Productive coasts

Professor Martina Doblin: The name of my research group is Productive Coasts, and we largely research in three areas. The first is in climate change and how microorganisms, especially the photosynthetic microorganisms that grow in the ocean, how they’re responding to changes in the ocean.

The second area of research is on aquatic biosecurity and water quality, a really essential part of living sustainably in our cities. And the third element of our research program really concerns what can we make out of algae? So, algae are these microscopic plankton and we can grow them in artificial systems to produce useful products for society.

The research is allowing us to really help underpin a more sustainable future for society, so if we’re able to understand how the future ocean will work, we’ll be able to adapt and anticipate those changes better to adapt marine industries. We’ll also be able to live more sustainably in cities, treating sewage and stormwater discharges appropriately and designing infrastructure that will allow that to happen.

We’ve been able to, through our research, really open up a new frame for understanding impacts of climate change on microorganisms. So, rather than seeing them fixed in place, like a coral reef, plankton and microscopic plankton move through the ocean. They drift. And so we’re actually using this moving frame to understand their environmental experience.

One of our key research questions is what will happen to these organisms if they no longer have changes in the environment that are predictable? The ocean is becoming a little bit more chaotic, a little bit more disturbed through all the impacts of warming and acidification, and so these organisms are living in an increasingly unpredictable world and our research is really taking us into a direction where we’re able to understand that better.

In the new three to five years, I think Productive Coasts will really be working much more closely with engineers and modellers to come up with integrated solutions for managing, for example, water quality. The second thing that we will do is really start to understand algal metabolism in a way that we can tweak it so that these organisms can utilise sunlight but also create products that are useful for our society.