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.
Prominent researchers in the fields of biology and fisheries science are set to gather on September 6-7, 2021, in Paris to celebrate the 30th anniversary of FishBase and the 15th anniversary of SeaLifeBase.
Hosted at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, on the banks of the river Seine, the FishBase and SeaLifeBase Symposium will bring together renowned scientists such as Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese, Jessica Meeuwig, Jos Snoeks, among others, who will present the different uses of FishBase and SeaLifeBase in the fields of ecology, biogeography, fisheries, taxonomy and aquariology.
To mark World Oceans Day 2021, the Sea Around Us team took on a challenge presented by NGO Mundus Maris and decided to think about one of the many problems our oceans are facing and reflect on the efforts being made to address the issue at hand.
This is how the above video came to be.
Since fisheries are at the centre of our work, we wanted to shed light on how reinterpretations of the Maximum Sustainable Yield model developed in 1954 by M.B. Schaefer are encouraging fishing practices that decimate fish populations.
Based on the paper “MSY needs no epitaph—but it was abused” by Daniel Pauly and Rainer Froese, and the paper “Fishery biomass trends of exploited fish populations in marine ecoregions, climatic zones and ocean basins” by Palomares et al., the video shows how the initial Schaefer model, which refers to the theoretical highest catch that a fish stock can support in the long-term given that environmental conditions do not change much, has been modified by fisheries scientists and managers to a point where it promotes overfishing.
But if kept in its original format and when combined with recently developed computer-intensive stock assessment methods, the Schaefer model has been identified – both in the literature and in the video – as a viable mechanism for effective ecosystem-based fisheries management.
The FishBase, SeaLifeBase, Aquamaps, Q-Quatics team.
As part of the campaign that was launched in 2020 to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of FishBase and the 15th Anniversary of SeaLifeBase, we are joining forces with our partner projects and presenting the stories of the people behind the scenes who have been instrumental in ensuring the longevity of these two global biodiversity information systems.
Maintaining big data projects takes a lot. A lot of people to conduct research, populate databases, verify information, make the data accessible. It also requires a lot of material and financial resources.