Looking back at 2025

This site is, among other things, an attempt to make progress visible. Not as a continuous upward curve, but as work that advances unevenly, with pauses, reorientations, and phases of low momentum. The turn of the year offers a natural moment to stop and look back. Over the past twelve months, there were extended periods in which it felt as though little was moving forward. In hindsight, some of these phases were not only perceived as slow but were objectively fragmented. They are part of the year just as much as moments of completion or clarity. One reason for maintaining this blog is to retain access to my own goals, motivations, and longer-term direction - especially during such phases. Writing here has functioned less as reporting and more as a way of staying oriented: documenting decisions, partial results, and open questions while the work is still ongoing. With that in mind, and without overstating their importance, the following sections collect the main points where things did come together over the course of 2025.

January / February

At the beginning of the year, I completed and released VerFishD, a Python library for simulating vertical fish distribution. The model focuses on how fish adjust their vertical position in response to physical stimuli such as light and temperature.

March

In March, I took part in the Open Sea Lab Hackathon as part of the team Digital Lighthouse. Our project, Smoke on the Water, examined the influence of wildfires on marine ecosystems, using data-driven visualisations to make these interactions visible.

This phase also resulted in a small but practical tool: drone-video-stabilizer. The tool was developed to stabilise drone footage from behavioural experiments at the Marine Science Center, where slight camera movements caused by wind interfere with the analysis of animal trajectories. The stabilisation step makes such analyses feasible without changing the experimental setup.

May

In May, I joined a sprat survey together with the Thünen Institute aboard the research vessel Solea.

The experience was intense and instructive, but also emotionally challenging. Seeing large numbers of fish processed for scientific purposes is not something I feel a need to repeat, even while recognising its role in fisheries research.

Still, the time at sea provided a direct, unfiltered perspective on the realities behind many of the datasets I usually encounter only in abstract form.

June

In June, I completed lifeguard training. This was a deliberate preparatory step toward applying for research diver training planned for 2026. At the time of writing, the outcome of that application is still open, with a decision expected in March 2026.

Parallel to this, the first concrete steps toward an otolith-based research project took shape, marking the beginning of a longer-term line of work.

July / August

After being successfully selected for the PhD Summer School of the EU-CONEXUS, I attended the summer school in La Rochelle. There, I met Oihana. The collaboration that followed later led to the successful DELPHI (Data - Ecology Learning Partnership for Holistic Integration) seed funding application.

Separately from this, the summer sailing holiday was a personal highlight of the year and provided a deliberate break from ongoing work.

October

From October onwards, my focus on participatory research and citizen science became more concrete. While the decision to move in this direction had already matured earlier in the year, this was the point where I actively began to professionalise my engagement with these topics.

November

November was dense. I took part in the partX training programme, initiated the otolith project together with Farnaz, and drafted a project sketch for partX funding). Much of this work involved coordination and framing rather than execution, but it laid foundations that extend beyond the calendar year.

December

December brought several strands together. I took part in EurIPS and the partX closing event, prepared teaching material for a lecture on decision trees, and this blog went live. Publishing the site marked a personal milestone: creating a place to document work in progress, reflect publicly, and make intermediate steps visible rather than waiting for formal endpoints.

Closing reflection

Even though the year appears fragmented when viewed through individual projects and months, it feels noticeably clearer in retrospect. Over the course of 2025, I found and began to commit to a focus on citizen science - as a way to strengthen science transfer, foster mutual understanding, and contribute to Blue Literacy in the context of the UN Ocean Decade - alongside continued work in marine biology and oceanography.

Two funded projects emerged from this process: Reflective Tools for Participatory Research (partX) and the DELPHI project developed together with Oihana. Both provide a concrete basis for further work in the coming year. I am curious to see how these threads will evolve, and where they will lead next.