In Eric Collins seminar, he presented some very interesting results from studies done in Arctic marine environments. He presented a lot of interesting and unknown (to me) facts about the Arctic ice and how the global environment is affecting it. From the topic of ice, Collins moved into the topic of microbial diversity in arctic environments. He talked about how different techniques were used in order to investigate the diversity and function of Arctic bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, etc. and how this was important for the several ongoing projects that are being conducted in the Arctic, which in turn will be used to build a conceptual model of diversity flux.
I think this was a very interesting seminar, and I really liked how he presented the information with the help of graphs and figures to better the understanding of what he was talking about. In class, we have talked about different factors that affect microbial growth (temperature, nutrient availability, etc.), which Collins also mentions about in his seminar.
Because the ice in the Artic is melting so quickly lots of microbial diversity is lost, is there any way of measuring this loss?