Category: Contact

Sea Around Us, Oceana organize workshop for the National Symposium of Fisheries

Sea Around Us and Oceana have organized a workshop on Philippine fisheries as part of the National Symposium of Fisheries. The workshop will be held at the Luxent Hotel, Quezon City, Philippines on November 4-5.

The workshop will acquaint Philippine fisheries practitioners with the catch reconstruction work (Palomares and Pauly 2014) recently published as a Fisheries Centre Research Report at the University of British Columbia.

One of the primary objectives of the workshop is to provide practitioners with alternative terminology — including industrial fisheries, artisanal fisheries, subsistence fisheries and recreational fisheries — to help clarify current issues within the Philippine’s marine fisheries.

This session will also involve brainstorming exercises to inspire a re-thinking of data collection methods and create a preliminary work plan to implement these methods.

“We would like to be able to inspire a re-thinking of the Philippine fisheries catch statistics collection system, which has not been improved on since it was put in place in the 1960s,” said Maria Palomares, a senior research fellow at Sea Around Us. “We hope that the workshop will provide enough evidence that such a re-thinking is necessary to establish a solid and implementable catch statistics collection system.”

The workshop will also help introduce Philippine fisheries practitioners with Oceana, who have recently set up an office in the Philippines.

For more information on the symposium, visit http://bit.ly/1pbfm4M.

 

Sea Around Us heads to Philippines for National Symposium of Fisheries

On November 3, experts from the Philippines, Oceana and the Sea Around Us will gather in Quezon City, Philippines to attend the National Symposium on Fisheries organized by Oceana-Philippines.

Sea Around Us Professor Daniel Pauly will give the keynote address on the global reconstruction work the Sea Around Us has conducted, with particular emphasis on how this was done for the Phillippines. The Sea Around Us team will then present the challenges posed and the opportunities created as a result of this reconstruction study on Philippine marine capture fisheries.

The symposium aims to gather the perspectives from select stakeholders in the fisheries sector, the justice system, academics, non-governmental organizations and members of the business community. This is an inaugural activity for the organizer, Oceana-Philippines, which was established by Oceana early this year.

Over the course of two days, there will be panel discussions and open forums.  Topics discussed will include the state of fisheries, challenges, impacts, reform proposals and discussions on best practices in sustainable fisheries governance and law enforcement.

For more information on the symposium, visit http://bit.ly/1pbfm4M.

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Sea Around US receives $2.6 million grant from The Paul G. Allen Foundation to improve data on world fisheries

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The University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project has received $2.6 million (U.S.) from The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to provide African and Asian countries with more accurate and comprehensive fisheries data to help them better analyze and support their ocean resources and local economies.

“This generous support will help UBC fisheries researchers work with countries to better understand the industry’s impact on marine ecosystems and its social and economic benefits,” UBC President Arvind Gupta said. “The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is giving our researchers an exceptional opportunity to work with global communities.”

The project, led by UBC Fisheries Centre Professors Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, will provide comprehensive catch data and data collection methods to policy-makers and nongovernmental organizations working with countries in West Africa, East Africa, the Arab world and South Asia.

Researchers will help countries use this data to address national policies related to four main problem areas:

  • Increased public transparency of access agreements for foreign vessels to fish in a country’s waters;
  • Improving inadequate methods for recording or estimating fish catches;
  • Improving poor policy and management environments for local small-scale fisheries; and
  • Illegal fishing by foreign fleets.

“This project is significant for the global fisheries community,” Pauly said. “The data collected will help governments make informed national policy decisions by balancing economic growth with resource preservation.”

Sea Around Us started this project June 1, 2014, and it will run to June 1, 2016. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s funding will also support FishBase, the Philippines-based research partner of Sea Around Us, which aims to create the largest and most extensively accessed online database about fishes on the web. 

You can read the full press release here

Study finds fish catches in Panama vastly under-reported

New Sea Around Us research estimates Panama’s total fish catches were vastly under-reported — by almost 40 per cent — between 1950 and 2010.

The recent study, led by Sea Around Us’ Sarah Harper and co-authored by Kyrstn Zylich, Dirk Zeller and  Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Héctor Guzmán, was published in Marine Fisheries Review’s most recent issue.

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Panamanian artisanal fisher cleaning his daily catch

The research not only found a high number of fish — including tuna, shellfish and shark — taken from Panama’s waters was unaccounted for, but it also revealed data deficiencies.

“Fisheries catch data collection, as is the case in many countries, focus mainly on large-scale operations and the commercial sector under the assumption that small-scale fisheries are insignificant,” Harper said. “This catch reconstruction highlights the substantial under-reporting of small-scale catches.”

Other major components missing from official Panamanian data include discarded bycatch, which is often overlooked but can be considerable, according to Harper. Poor fisheries monitoring, data collection and lack of human resources to spot errors also contribute to data deficiencies.

Accurate catch accounts are important to the national economy, especially in Panama, where fish like lobster and shrimp are major exports.

“Given the important economic and food security contributions of Panama’s fisheries, efforts must be made by fisheries governing bodies to improve catch data collection and reporting,” Harper said.

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12th annual FishBase symposium comes to UBC

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The 12th annual FishBase symposium, organized by the FishBase Consortium’s Vice Chair, will be held in Vancouver at the Beaty Auditorium at the University of British Columbia September 8, 2014.

The symposium is a joint event between the Sea Around Us, the Beaty Museum and the Fishbase Information and Research Group based in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines. It’s being held in tandem with the FishBase Consortium Annual Meeting with support from the French Consulate in Vancouver.

This year’s symposium is titled: Big Old Data and Shiny New Insights: Using FishBase for Research, which reflects the theme of the event.

“The symposium is really about putting the value where its worth and telling people that hey, FishBase is used in research, and therefore merits continued support,” said Dr. Maria Lourdes D. Palomares, the Consortium’s vice-chair and Sea Around Us senior researcher.

Invited speakers, who consist of FishBase users, collaborators or educators, will talk about the importance of FishBase in big data research meta-analyses.

“We are extracting new knowledge, some of which were instrumental in shifting paradigms in the fish biology and fisheries world, out of this huge accumulation of data,” Palomares said.

FishBase is an online information system on all fishes in the world that has been active for 25 years.  For more information on the symposium, its schedule and speakers, visit the Facebook page, the event page or the eventbrite page