How does marine research work? What technical solutions help us to better understand our oceans and use them sustainably? And what sort of people actually work in ocean technology? 13 schoolgirls aged between 14 and 18 explored these questions at this year’s ocean technology inventors camp. From July 6 to 9, 2026, they learnt about the enormous breadth of marine research and marine technology – primarily through hands-on experience – at the IOW and together with various other partners of the Ocean Technology Campus Rostock.

Microbial communities are highly sensitive to environmental changes, yet their enormous diversity makes it difficult to identify ecological patterns. A research team from the IOW has now shown that an AI method originally developed for text analysis can be successfully applied to the analysis of complex environmental samples. The method identified five seasonally successive microbial sub-communities in the Warnow estuary while preserving ecological and functional information just as well as conventional methods – in some cases they even performed better.