Antarctic Food Web, Climate Change Are Subject of CCPO Speaker

Tosca Ballerini, a postdoctoral researcher at Old Dominion University's Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography (CCPO), will discuss her work with a food web model for the Southern Ocean as part of the CCPO Spring Seminar Series Monday, Feb. 8.

The talk, "An End-to-End Model for the Marine Ecosystem West of the Antarctic Peninsula," will begin at 3:30 p.m. in Room 3200 of the Innovation Research Park Building 1. The seminar is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served beginning at 3 p.m.

Ballerini is involved in a U.S. Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) synthesis and integration project that is comparing marine food web dynamics in the Southern Ocean, Northwest Atlantic, Northeast Pacific and coastal Gulf of Alaska. Her first efforts have been to develop a food web model for the western Antarctic Peninsula that can be used to evaluate the effects of changes in food web structure that might occur with climate change.

The speaker received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Biology of Polar Habitats from the University of Siena in Italy in 2007.