My research explores the productivity of coastal waters and the factors that drive fundamental ecosystem processes such as primary productivity and respiration. Seafloor habitats are a key focus of my work, because they represent hotspots of biodiversity and productivity within the coastal zone but they remain poorly studied. Filling in this knowledge gap requires a novel interdisciplinary approach that investigates productivity rates in combination with other factors of influence such as sunlight and nutrient availability, hydrodynamics, and biodiversity. The success of this work is tightly linked to the use of new and evolving technologies such as Aquatic Eddy Covariance and microsensor techniques.