# First person – Nienke Zwaferink

## TL;DR

This paper is an interview with Nienke Zwaferink, a graduate who studied how marine species shape coastal ecosystems.

## Contribution

The paper introduces Nienke Zwaferink and her research on marine benthic species' ecological roles.

## Key findings

- Nienke researched the thermal window of exercise performance in Lanice conchilega.
- She explored how marine benthic species influence coastal ecosystems as habitat-formers.

## Abstract

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Nienke Zwaferink is first author on ‘
Thermal window of exercise performance of the ecosystem engineer Lanice conchilega’, published in BiO. Nienke conducted the research described in this article while a Master's student in Professor David Thieldges's lab at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, The Netherlands, and the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, The Netherlands. She is now a recently graduated Master's student interested in the mechanisms by which marine benthic species act as habitat-formers and influence the structure and functioning of coastal ecosystems.