The Sea Around Us, together with the French Embassy in Canada, the University of Montpellier, FRB-CESAB: Centre de Synthèse et d’Analyse sur la Biodiversité and Rutgers University, is hosting the conference Fish biodiversity facing global change.
The event, which will take place on April 6, 2023, from 2-3 pm, at the University of British Columbia’s Michael Smith Labs Theatre, will present activities of the FISHGLOB consortium which has collected and combined a unique data set of scientific bottom trawl surveys conducted regularly during the last decades across the planet.
Topics will cover species assemblages’ homogenization/differentiation through time, consequences on fish stocks shared across countries, and fishery management.
The FISHGLOB consortium deals with the issue of data availability and heterogeneity to improve researchers’ capabilities to assess and monitor short and long-term changes in species distribution and biodiversity. This, knowing that global change, linked to climate and direct anthropogenic impacts, is causing redistribution of marine species worldwide, modifying fish populations and stock structure, as well as community compositions. These changes may have strong impacts on fisheries and natural fish biodiversity as well as related ecosystem services.
Overall, FISHGLOB’s goal is to provide a platform enhancing international cooperation and knowledge transfer among data providers, scientists and stakeholders in order to support biodiversity and fishery management adaptation in a time of global change.
RSVP here.
FISHGLOB Speakers
- Bastien Mérigot, Marbec
- Aurore Maureaud, Yale University
- Zoë Kitchel, Rutgers University
- Juliano A. Palacios, University of British Columbia
- Malin Pinsky, Rutgers University
- Nancy Shackell, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO)
- James Thorson, NOAA
- Deng Palomares, Sea Around Us – University of British Columbia
- Robert Guralnick, USC
In addition to this conference, the speakers are participating in a week-long workshop at the University of British Columbia where they are working on some of the project’s main tasks, namely, (i) collecting and combining unique data sets of more than 70 scientific trawl surveys across the globe (metadata and species abundance from more than 220,000 haul samples) and species traits of marine fishes, as well as (ii) assessing changes in species life-history strategy composition and community diversity of fish, across time at complementary spatial scales (local to global) in tropical, temperate and boreal ecosystems.
FISHGLOB consortium members at UBC on April 3, 2023.