Dr Glenn Johnstone — applied benthic biologist

Video transcript

Antarctica's marine systems have a big influence on the marine systems all over the world and on global weather and ocean circulation patterns, and Antarctica's biology, its coastal biology, is a kind of canary in a coalmine for lots of global issues.

My name is Glenn Johnstone and I'm the Applied Benthic Biologist here in the Human Impacts Group so we study and utilise sea floor invertebrates to monitor the health of the environment.

We've catalogued over 500 species that live on or in the sea floor. So how that community changes can tell us a lot about how the conditions within the sea water and the surrounding atmosphere and land use is impacting on those communities.

It's minus-2 degrees in the water, but it's only the surface of the water that freezes, and underneath that ice there's a whole world of colour and diversity.

So obviously you've got to get down to have a look at them, they're all underwater. So in the past we've used diving, either through the sea ice or from boats, and the last season we explored a slightly different method of using a remotely operated vehicle, so that's a small, tethered underwater vehicle that we can drive. We can see from the surface what it's doing. We attach some cameras onto that. We deploy it through the sea ice and then we're able to drive that around underwater and to get imagery of the sea floor, and we can also put attachments on that, which mean we can take some small samples of the sea floor if we need to do that.

They're as colourful as any creatures you'd find on a reef off Tasmania or even in a tropical reef. So we've got bright reds and oranges, lots of yellow sponges, whites. There's not a lot of movement like you would see in some reefs. It's very cold. Things move slowly. They try to conserve their energy. But as far as the colour goes and the diversity goes, it's a really beautiful environment.

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Dr Glenn Johnstone: Bachelor of Environmental Science (Hons), PhD

Research interests

Sea floor habitats around coastal Antarctica are biodiversity hotspots, full of activity, colour and species found nowhere else on earth. Marine invertebrates dominate these dynamic communities and provide a useful tool for monitoring how these ecosystems are changing over time. Human activities can impact on even these remote and rarely seen habitats.

Over the last 20 years I’ve been involved in various research projects focused on how human activities influence coastal Antarctic marine communities, particularly the biodiversity of sea floor invertebrates. Such projects use a range of biological, chemical and environmental sampling and imagery survey techniques to monitor and assess the effect of local (past and present station activities) to global scale potential impacts, such as climate change. In addition, several of these projects have monitored the effectiveness of management activities, such as cleaning-up old waste disposal sites and remediating contaminated areas. All of our research projects directly inform the policy settings and environmental management of Australia’s Antarctic Territory.

A large part of my role is to organise and lead the field component of our research projects. This has meant spending many summers in Antarctica, working on, through and under the sea ice, and from boats in the coastal bays around Australia’s Antarctic research stations. My first summer in Antarctica was as a volunteer, leading a small team on a project for the University of Wollongong, where I was completing a PhD. That work led to part-time work and eventually a full-time role with the Antarctic Division. Organising and participating in safe, productive and rewarding field research is still a very motivating and satisfying aspect of my role.

Current projects

A Cleaner Antarctica
Biodiversity of East Antarctica: Underwater and Terrestrial (BEAUT)

Collaborations & representations

University of Tasmania / Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies
Tasmanian Museum & Art Galley
CSIRO Marine Hobart

Key outcome areas

Committee for Environmental Protection (CEP)
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Publications

Stark, J. S., Johnstone, G. J., Palmer, A. S., Snape, I., Larner, B. L. & Riddle, M. J. (2007), Monitoring the remediation of a near shore waste disposal site in Antarctica using the amphipod Paramoera walkeri and diffusive gradients in thin films (DGTs). Marine Pollution Bulletin, 52, 1595-1610.

Gillies C.L, Stark J.S, Johnstone G.J, Smith S.D.A (2013), Establishing a food web model for coastal Antarctic benthic communities: a case study from the Vestfold Hills, Marine Ecology Progress Series, 478, 27-41.

Stark J.S, Johnstone G., Riddle M.J (2014), A sediment mesocosm experiment to determine if the remediation of a shoreline waste disposal site in Antarctica caused further environmental impacts. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 89: 1-2.

Smith J, O’Brien P.E, Stark J.S, Johnstone G.J, Riddle M.J (2015), Integrating multibeam sonar and underwater video data to map benthic habitiats in East Antarctic nearshore environments, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, 164, 520-536.

Jonathan S. Stark , Patricia A. Corbett, Glenn Dunshea, Glenn Johnstone, Catherine King, Julie A. Mondon, Michelle L. Power, Angelingifta Samuel, Ian Snape, Martin Riddle., 2016. The environmental impact of sewage and wastewater outfalls in Antarctica: An example from Davis station, East Antarctica. Water Research 105, 602-614.

Stark J.S, Roden N.P, Johnstone G.J, Milnes M, Black J.G, Whiteside S, Kirkwood W, Newbery K, Stark S, van Ooijen E, Tilbrook B, Peltzer E.T, Berry K & Roberts D (2018), Carbon chemistry of an in-situ free-ocean CO² enrichment (antFOCE) in comparison to short term variation in Antarctic coastal waters, Nature Scientific Reports. Doi:10.1038/s41598-018-21029-1.

Black J.G, Stark J.S, Johnstone G.J, McMinn A, Boyd P, McKinlay J, Wotherspoon S, Runcie J.W (2019). In-situ behavioural and physiological responses of Antarctic microphytobenthos to ocean acidification. Scientific Reports. DOI 10.1038/s41598-018-36233-2.

Figuerola B, Gore D.B, Johnstone G.J, Stark J.S (2019). Spatio-temporal variation of skeletal Mg-calcite in Antarctic marine calcifiers. PLoS ONE 14(5), : e0210231. Doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210231.

Stark J.S, Peltzer E.T, Kline D.I, Queirós A.M, Cox T.E, Headley K, Barry J, Gazeau F, Runcie J.W, Stephen Widdicombe S, Milnes M, Roden N.P, Black J, Whiteside S, Johnstone G, Ingels J, Shaw E, Bodrossy L, Gaitan-Espitia J.D, Kirkwood W, Gattuso J (2019). Free Ocean CO2 Enrichment (FOCE) experiments: Scientific and technical recommendations for future in situ ocean acidification projects. Progress in Oceanography, 172, p89-107.

Clarke L.J, Suter L, Deagle B.E, Polanowski A.M, Terauds A, Johnstone G.J, & Stark J.S (2021). Environmental DNA metabarcoding for monitoring metazoan biodiversity in Antarctic nearshore ecosystems. PeerJ. Doi 10.7717/peerj.12458.

See more of Dr Johnstone's publications on ResearchGate.

This content was last updated 10 months ago on 17 May 2022.