Dario Di Girolamo

I am a PhD Biology Researcher at Queen’s University Belfast currently studying the food web of Lough Neagh and how they’ve been affected by eutrophication, under the supervision of Professor Mark Emmerson, Dr. Neil Reid, and Professor Lesley Lancaster.

As the largest freshwater lake in the UK, Lough Neagh is currently facing several environmental issues, including eutrophication, algal blooms, biodiversity loss, rising water temperatures, and invasive species. The goal of my research is to understand how eutrophication has affected food web structure and whether this has eroded the resilience of the Lough Neagh ecological community and its capacity to absorb, recover, and adapt to perturbations such as climate change and eutrophication.