Marine Animal Diversity, Monitoring, and Habitats

Knowledge:

This course gives the participants a broad knowledge about

• Marine animal diversity. 
• Life history traits and adaptions to the enviroment. 
• Methods of field collection and monitoring. 
• Identification of Danish marine fish and invertebrates to species level. 

Skills:

By the end of the course the students are expected to have achieved the following skills:

• Describe the morphology,functional traits and taxonomy of the main phyla and classes of marine animals and relate it to environmental and habitat adaptions.
• Identify Danish marine fish and marine benthic invertebrates to the family, genus and/or species level.
• Overall knowledge about the phylogeny and evolution of the major groups of marine animals.
• Use techniques for collection and identification of marine meiofauna, holo- and meroplankton, macrofauna and megafauna.  

Competences:

By the end of the course the students are expected to have achieved the following competences:

• Relate the density of inviduals, species density and species composition of specific benthic macrofauna to enviromental and habitat conditions.
• Be able to choose the optimal and most sustainable collection devise for a given type of benthic fauna survey.
• Be able to differentiate between sampling gear types used for qualitative and quantitative investigation and to perform a critical evaluation of the methods advantages and limitation for the results and conclusions.
• Plan and perform a quantitative benthic macrofaunal investigation, including analysis and discussion of the results.