Dr. Florian Roth is a marine biologist carrying out interdisciplinary projects that integrate ecological, metabolic, and biogeochemical data to understand how marine organisms interact with their environment. He is particularly interested in the mechanisms and rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling by benthic communities in response to global (warming and acidification) and local (eutrophication, pollutants, and overfishing) stressors. Florian did his Bachelor in Biology in landlocked Düsseldorf (Germany), after which he quickly moved to continue with a Masters in “International Studies in Aquatic Tropical Ecology”. During his Ph.D. at KAUST, he developed a new approach to assess biogeochemical processes of structurally complex benthic communities in situ and evaluated the impacts of coral-algal phase shifts for community-wide biogeochemical functions. Florian is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Baltic Sea Centre (Stockholm University, Sweden) and Tvärminne Zoological Station (University of Helsinki, Finland), where he looks at carbon fluxes and the balance of climate-relevant greenhouse gases from shallow-water nearshore coastal habitats.