Dr. Tonke Strack

Hi, my name is Tonke and I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Micropaleontology-Paleoceanography group here at MARUM. During my PhD, I studied the long-term response of marine plankton biodiversity (mainly planktonic foraminifera) to past climate change. My recent project is part of the of the coordinated programme AGELESS (Leveraging long-term plankton diversity data to develop a framework to assess and protect biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction) which is funded by the BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung).

The integration of turnover rates estimated from sedimentary archives with direct observations is still challenging because of temporal integration, taphonomy and the lack of data on absolute abundances. Within AGELESS, my project (SP3.2: Bridging the gap between past and present observations of turnover dynamics using long-term sediment trap time series) addresses those challenges by exploiting the fact that time series of planktonic foraminifera shell fluxes from moored sediment traps can be directly compared to the sedimentary archive and hence bridge the gap between past and present observations of turnover dynamics. It will use data from a recent global synthesis of planktonic foraminifera shell flux time series (FORCIS; Chaabane et al., 2023), extend existing time series from the East Atlantic (Romero et al., 2020) and the Mediterranean Sea (Rigual-Hernández et al., 2012) by analysing material that has already been collected by MARUM and by collaborators.