Vanessa is doing her PhD at Oxford on soft coral biodiversity, conservation and phylogenetics. Soft corals (a.k.a octocorals) are an understudied group of corals found all over the world from deep to shallow waters in both polar and tropical seas. They are the dominant corals of the Caribbean, providing habitat for many reef creatures, and yet many aspects of their basic biology as well as species’ status remain mysterious. Vanessa’s research focuses on the role these organisms play in island reef ecosystems and how their species richness and abundance affects their health in a context of human impact.
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