MARDI Scientific goals

The objectives of the MARDI working group are:

To align concepts of Arctic marine diatom taxonomy across various datasets through a series of workshops.
To agree on community-wide protocols for the preparation of diatom samples.
To bring together existing diatom training sets from different research groups into one unified and open-access database which can be used across the Arctic.
To advance the current state of quantitative transfer functions and develop new semi-quantitative approaches, based on the new integrated, pan-Arctic diatom database.
To improve understanding of diatom-environment relationships.
To reassess previously published quantitative reconstructions.
To train early-career diatomists to use the improved and unified taxonomy as well as the new quantitative reconstruction techniques.