Myriam Khalfallah during her PhD defence on March 26, 2020.
In the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, Myriam Khalfallah defended her PhD dissertation titled Data-poor Fisheries: Case studies from the Southern Mediterranean and the Arabian peninsula.
Despite having to present from her living room via a videoconferencing system to comply with the physical distancing measures imposed by the B.C. health authorities, Khalfallah obtained unanimous approval for her thesis.
Men fishing in Seychelles. Photo by Tiare Scott, Flickr.
Comprehensive fisheries data are needed in the Republic of Seychelles to back the country’s path towards a blue economy, where environmentally sustainable and equitable practices are implemented to make use of various ocean resources for economic growth.
New research by the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean, in collaboration with Hanna Jabour Christ of the Marine Futures Lab at the University of Western Australia, revealed that there are discrepancies between the actual quantities and species of fish caught in the Seychelles Exclusive Economic Zone and what is being reported by regulatory agencies and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The year 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of FishBase and 15th anniversary of SeaLifeBase, two online global biodiversity information systems that, together, provide biological and ecological information on more than 110,000 marine species.
To celebrate these milestones in the times of physical distancing, we are launching a year-long digital campaign that leads up to September 2020, when we celebrate these anniversaries, and to September 2021, when we hope to get together in person at a symposium to be held during the Annual FishBase Consortium Meeting.
Rainer Froese. Image from FishBase.
Long-time Sea Around Us collaborator, Dr Rainer Froese, has just received the Ocean Award in the Science category for his contributions to marine conservation and ocean health through the development of novel fish stock assessment methods particularly suited for data-poor contexts.
Galápagos. Image by averno_ph, Needpix.
An international team of researchers led by experts at the Charles Darwin Foundation and with the collaboration of the Sea Around Us principal investigator, Daniel Pauly, and William Cheung, from the Changing Ocean Research Unit at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, just published a commentary in Nature Climate Change proposing the idea of Galápagos as a living laboratory for the Anthropocene.