Daniel Pauly, Anna Luna Rossi and Fabrice Teletchea at the 2025 International Congress on Aquatic Sciences in Saint Pierre and Miquelon

Sea Around Us team exposes coastal ecosystem pressures at Saint Pierre and Miquelon congress

Daniel Pauly, Anna Luna Rossi and Fabrice Teletchea at the 2025 International Congress on Aquatic Sciences in Saint Pierre and Miquelon

Daniel Pauly, Anna Luna Rossi and Fabrice Teletchea at the 2025 International Congress on Aquatic Sciences in Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Photo by Studio Briand Photographe | Archipel Développement.

The Sea Around Us principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and master’s student, Anna Luna Rossi, made a splash in Saint Pierre and Miquelon by participating in the fifth edition of the International Congress on Aquatic Sciences, which took place from September 28th to October 2nd, 2025.

The congress was structured around four main themes—fishing and aquaculture, citizen science and education, aquatic biodiversity, and maritime transport —and hosted 48 presentations, all of them meant to foster exchanges between researchers, businesses, and citizens, with a particular focus on young people.

Participants also visited the Grand Barachois, a large natural lagoon that lies immediately south of Miquelon Island, and is formed by the 12-kilometre-long tombolo of La Dune.

A Ghanaian lagoon

During the lecture segment of the conference, Dr. Pauly presented “Lessons learned from the life and death of a small coastal lagoon.” In this talk, the Sea Around Us PI recounted how back in 1971, he collected hydrographic and biological data in a small coastal brackish water lagoon in Ghana, West Africa, whose ecology and fishery dynamics ended up becoming the topic of his MSc thesis, completed at the University of Kiel in Germany.

Dr. Pauly visited the lagoon again in 1998 and later on in 2024, only to witness its complete disappearance. His lecture, thus, reflected on how the lagoon could be understood as a microcosm of the human-led destruction of fragile ecosystems across the world.

Modelling and predicting impacts

Also on the topic of the anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems, the Sea Around Us student, Anna Luna Rossi, presented two chapters of her master’s thesis, “The marine biodiversity of SPM and its position on a global insular gradient” and “Modelling the sea around Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and projecting the impact of different fishing scenarios on local species.”

In her first talk, Ms. Rossi detailed how her analysis of biodiversity assessments conducted around Saint Pierre and Miquelon revealed that area size and temperature (via latitude) influence species richness in the waters surrounding the archipelago, as well as in 40 other archipelagos worldwide, and supports the broader utility of island biogeography principles for understanding and predicting marine biodiversity and ecosystem services.

In her second talk, the Sea Around Us student described the two ecosystem models she developed for SPM using reconstructed catch data from 1950 to 2022 and the Ecopath with Ecosim software. She also presented a dynamic ecosystem model created to project different fishing scenarios onto the ecosystem and better understand their effect on biomass, trophic relationships, and possible future stock statuses, information that is crucial for marine conservation and fishery recovery policies.

Also in the media

The Sea Around Us team attending the SPM Congress not only showcased their research in the plenary sessions but also gave interviews to France Télévisions, the French national public television broadcaster, and France Info, the radio network operated by the French public service radio broadcaster Radio France. They spoke about the ways to apply ecosystem modelling and catch reconstructions to benefit Saint Pierre and Miquelon’s management of marine resources.

Corsica, the guest of honour

Back at the conference room of the Saint-Pierre Les Terrasses du Port, the region of Corsica was the congress’s guest of honour. Accordingly, Dr. Eric Durieux, from the University of Corsica Pasquale Paoli and a Sea Around Us collaborator, presented the work he and his colleagues conducted to update the reconstruction of the marine fisheries catches in the Corsican Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to 2022.

Prompted by the Sea Around Us global catch reconstruction update project, Dr. Durieux and his team’s analyses allowed for the characterization and quantification of landed and discarded catches down to the species level, and showed sharp declines in the past 15 years.

According to the group, their study constitutes a unique island case study in the Mediterranean, highlighting the crucial challenges related to maintaining and promoting the artisanal fishing model as an essential lever for the sustainable management of fisheries resources.

To watch all the sessions from the fifth International Congress on Aquatic Sciences in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, visit https://www.spmplay.fr/smartlists/congres-des-sciences-aquatiques-2025