Research interests
I am a marine biologist with background and experience in ecology, big data, GIS and fisheries management. I am motivated to address the scientific questions of global significance and I believe that, in addition to my skills, my intercultural and interdisciplinary studies and experiences help me approach these questions from multiple perspectives needed to study them in depth.
The contemporary topics that concern me the most are providing the food security (fisheries management) and preserving our natural heritage for the future generations (climate change and its implications). My MSc project resulted in a proposal for a pelagic division of the Atlantic Ocean to guide ecosystem advice and management of highly migratory species under the purview of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).
I have chosen to focus my research on understanding the impacts of climate change on Earth system functioning next. In the light of the global crisis that is climate change, paleoclimatic research can help paint a picture of our climate before the anthropogenic factor was introduced in the story, and that is why I have joined the project OASIS as a Doctoral Candidate under supervision of Dr. Henry C. Wu. During my next few years, I will work with the coral samples from the Pacific Ocean to reconstruct seasonal changes in sea surface temperature and sea surface salinity, yearly to seasonal changes in pH, as well as to make an estimation of the carbon uptake of the ocean making it possible to predict future developments.
Research focus
Certain massive corals such as Porites spp. could easily be called the history books of oceans as they can grow to be centuries old while incorporating various climate tracers we can use to reconstruct the oceanic environmental variables. They usually have a skeletal growth rate that lets us obtain records at sub-seasonal scale, and the annual skeletal banding helps us have a better idea of how old they are, and they are distributed throughout the tropics.
During my Doctoral candidacy and as a part of the OASIS project, I will use the coral samples from various locations in the Pacific Ocean to study the development of the Ocean Acidification from the Pre-Industrial Revolution time until now. In addition to the main objective of the study, I plan to use the historical SST, SSS and pH data reconstructions we achieve to study the variability of the major climatic phenomena in the Pacific such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and their influence on the spatiotemporal variation of the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) extent.
Furthermore, this project aims to overcome the current limitation of sporadically available records from coral cores of various regions and achieve the first global, spatially distributed pH reconstruction of the tropical oceans.
Find out more about the OASIS project here.
The OASIS project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the "Make Our Planet Great Again – German Research Initiative", grant number 57429626 to Dr. Henry C. Wu (Junior Research Group Leader), implemented by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Education
2019-Present: Doctoral Candidate, Witnesses to the Climate Emergency: Ocean acidification crisis (OASIS) (Working Group Coral Climatology, ZMT, Bremen, Germany)
2015-2017: Erasmus Mundus Joint MSc Marine Environment and Resources (MER) (University of Southampton, United Kingdom; Universidad de País Vasco, Spain; Université de Liège, Belgium)
2010-2014: BSc Ecology (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Publications
Peer reviewed
• S. Todorovic, M.J. Juan-Jordá, H. Murua, H. Arrizabalaga, (2019), Pelagic Ecoregions: operationalizing an ecosystem approach to fisheries management in the Atlantic Ocean, Marine Policy
Reports
• M.J. Juan-Jordá, H. Murua, E. Andonegi, J.C Baez Barrionuevo, F. Abascal, R. Coelho, S. Todorovic, P. Apostolaki, C. Lynam, A. Perez Rodriguez, (2019), A pilot ecosystem plan for the Tropical Ecoregion of the Atlantic Ocean. Task 6 of Final Report. 123 pp.
• M.J. Juan-Jordá, H. Murua, E. Andonegi, J.C Baez Barrionuevo, F. Abascal, R. Coelho, S. Todorovic, P. Apostolaki, C. Lynam, A. Perez Rodriguez, (2019), A pilot ecosystem plan for the Temperate Ecoregion of the Indian Ocean. Task 6 of Final Report. 107 pp.
• M.J. Juan-Jordá, H. Murua, P. Apostolaki, C. Lynam, A. Perez Rodriguez, J.C Baez Barrionuevo, F. Abascal, R. Coelho, S. Todorovic, N. Billet, M. Uyarra, E. Andonegi, J. Lopez, (2018), Selecting ecosystem indicators for fisheries targeting highly migratory species. Final Report. 395pp.
• M.J. Juan-Jordá, H. Murua, P. Apostolaki, C. Lynam, A. Perez Rodriguez, J.C Baez Barrionuevo, F. Abascal, R. Coelho, S. Todorovic, N. Billet, M. Uyarra, E. Andonegi, J. Lopez, (2018), Selecting ecosystem indicators for fisheries targeting highly migratory species. Abridged version of Final Report. 25 pp.
• M.J. Juan-Jordá, H. Murua, S. Todorovic, (2018), Selecting ecosystem indicators for fisheries targeting highly migratory species. IOTC-2018-WPEB14-21_Rev1.