Dr Sabine Dittmann
AMSA Councillor: 2005 - 2010. Vice President 2010 -
I am Senior Lecturer for Marine Biology at the Flinders University in Adelaide and currently Director of the Lincoln Marine Science Centre in Port Lincoln. My research focus lies on the community and ecosystem ecology of coastal habitats, and I have worked extensively in temperate and tropical tidal flats of the North Sea, Australia and elsewhere. Here in South Australia, the research carried out by my team currently targets the biodiversity of tidal flats, mangroves and saltmarshes. We are specifically looking into the ecological role of certain macrofauna species to evaluate the functional diversity of these soft-sediment systems. We are also carrying out regular monitoring and specific investigations on the mudflats in the Coorong to assess the food availability for migratory waders and the response mechanisms of key benthic invertebrates to changing environmental conditions.
My background is in zoology and I obtained my PhD at the University of Goettingen, Germany, in 1987, with a project on mussel bed communities and the relevance of biodeposition in sedimentary systems. The approaches I am taking to investigate the ecology of intertidal soft sediments include manipulative field experiments, and I applied this during a three year postdoc at AIMS on species interactions in tropical tidal flats. Back in Germany, I was project leader for an interdisciplinary ecosystem analysis on the Wadden Sea for seven years, targeting the analysis of stability properties in this intertidal ecosystem. Alongside, I was affiliated with the Centre for Tropical Marine Ecology in Bremen, and started teaching at the University of Bremen, where I still hold academic status as Privatdozent after my habilitation in 2001.
I was one of the founding members of AMSA-SA and served until last year the as the secretary, and now as a regular committee member of our AMSA state branch.