In late September, the Sea Around Us principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, was among the virtual presenters at the World Fisheries Congress 2021, which was held in a hybrid format that included in-person presentations in Adelaide and online lectures, recorded sessions and discussion forums.
Two years after the release of Daniel Pauly: Un Océan de Combats, the English version of the biography of the Sea Around Us principal investigator is now available in bookstores.
Titled The Ocean’s Whistleblower: The Remarkable Life and Work of Daniel Pauly, the 342-page tome goes over Dr. Pauly’s scientific career as the whistleblower who alerted the public about the devastation caused to marine ecosystems by the global fishing industry.
The always buzzing Paris – which did its best to exhibit its usual accelerated rhythm even in pandemic times -, hosted on September 6-7, 2021, an equally dynamic FishBase and SeaLifeBase Symposium at the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution of the National Museum of Natural History.
One presentation after the next, about 100 attendees – half in-person, half online – were able to get a good grasp of the many ways FishBase and SeaLifeBase are used across disciplines and areas of interest, what is being done to improve certain database functionalities and what can be done to increase their interconnectedness with other biodiversity information systems.
Created in the year 2000, the FishBase Consortium’s mandate is to support the growth, sustainability and public accessibility of FishBase. Since 2005, it also oversees SeaLifeBase.
A simple fish stock assessment model applied to over 500 years of catch data demonstrated that if Canadian authorities had allowed for the rebuilding of the stock of northern Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1980s, annual catches of about 200,000 tonnes could have been sustained.