Mike Burrows has a PhD in population ecology of rocky shore organisms and did postdocs on behavioural ecology of predators and evidence for climate change impacts in long term ecological data before joining SAMS in 1991. Since 2001 he has been involved in projects collecting international-scale data on rocky shore communities in the UK, and has used these and similar datasets to analyse and model the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. In 2014 he led Scotland’s first Blue Carbon synthesis using literature reviews and GIS methods to estimate carbon budgets for coastal habitats and sediment stores.

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Projects: Scotland’s blue carbon: the contribution from seaweed detritus (Alasdair O’Dell). Completed in Jan 2022, this project quantified turnover of beach-cast material, rates of decay of kelp detritus and showed the presence of kelp-derived carbon in coastal and offshore sediments using DNA and isotopic biomarkers.

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Supervising: Alasdair O’Dell

Keywords: kelp, carbon, rocky intertidal communities, climate change