Nereus Fellow at Princeton University Colleen Petrik won the Science Board Best Presentation Award at the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) annual meeting, held in San Diego, from November 2 to 11. She gave a plenary presentation on “The response of fisheries production to natural and anthropogenic forcing: past, present and future”, using the results of the model she developed with her Nereus research.
“Our energy choices have ramifications for many other types of pollutants,” said Elsie Sunderland, Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University and Nereus Program collaborator. “Hydroelectric: when we flood our reservoirs we actually cause a dramatic pulse in methylmercury production, which is neurotoxic, and we also cause a pulse in CO2 and methane.”
Madingley is a global computational model. To a broad approximation, the Madingley model represents all (most) forms of life. It achieves this by using what’s called a functional-type representation. Species are aggregated in to broad categories that describe a select number of their properties, rather than everything about them. For some, this conceptual leap is too much. Why take a step towards representing all life, but miss the explicit inclusion of species? The answer lies in making the best of human knowledge, and balancing computational expense.
From November 2 to 13, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) held their annual meeting in San Diego, USA. The meeting celebrated the 25th anniversary of PICES with the theme of looking at the past 25 years and imagining the next 25. Some of the topics of interest included coastal ecosystem stressors, loss or changes of marine biodiversity, changing productivity and species distributions in response to climate change, developing outlooks or forecasts of future ocean ecosystems, and examining climate change impacts on ocean ecosystems and human society.
Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, and Indonesian men are subject to forced labor on Thai and foreign-owned fishing boats. Some remain at sea for several years, are paid very little or irregularly, work as much as 18 to 20 hours per day for seven days a week, or are reportedly threatened, physically beaten, drugged to work longer, and even killed for becoming ill, attempting to escape, or disobeying orders.
This information sheet looks at Japanese seafood imports and locations of forced and child labour.
For the past ten years, Sea Around Us has been constructing a more accurate view of world fishery catches, finding, among other things, that 30% of catch goes unreported. Now the work of 400 researchers from 273 countries, led by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, has been compiled in a comprehensive 520-page book called the Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries.
“Emptying seas, mounting tensions in fish-hungry Asia” was published yesterday by Nikkei Asian Review. It discusses the state and future of oceans and fisheries in Asia, with increasing demand yet overfished stocks, and features insights by Nereus Director of Policy Yoshitaka Ota.
“Spatial differentiation of marine eutrophication damage indicators based on species density” was recently published in Ecological Indicators, co-authored by Nereus Alumnus Miranda Jones (UNEP-WCMC) and Nereus Director of Science William Cheung. The paper looks at developing an index to assess eutrophication effects on marine ecosystems and introducing an ecosystem response indicator to nitrogen loadings to coastal waters.
