Role in CaRe-GR
Leads Task 4.1 (Sampling campaigns in under-studied marine areas) and Task 4.2 (Data analysis for characterizing cave communities), and co-leads Task 4.3 (Assessing the ecological status of marine caves).
Biography
Markos is a PhD student at the Department of Environment of the Ionian University, specialising in applied Marine Ecology. He is both a scientific diver and a caver while his doctoral research focuses on the benthic biodiversity of marine caves in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea including motile and sessile, indigenous and non-indigenous species.
Within the CaRe-GR project, he leads the main Tasks of WP4 aiming to describe the main biotic characteristics and the morphology of marine caves in under-studied marine areas of Greece according to non-destructive visual census protocols and photoQuadrat sampling. In collaboration with Vasilis Gerovasileiou, AI tools will be trained to automatically analyze photoquadrats from caves and calculate the percent coverage of their sessile biota while the ecological status of marine caves will be estimated with the ecosystem-based CavEBQI index.
Markos has been involved in scientific projects regarding marine conservation, assessment of non-indigenous species impacts, monitoring plans, visual census and photographic techniques, ecological quality assessment, citizen science and art- science initiatives.