Category: New & Notable

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Daniel Pauly talks to Juliet Eilperin about the future of oceans and fisheries

Daniel Pauly talking to Juliet Eilperin in Washington, D.C.

Daniel Pauly and Juliet Eilperin in Washington, D.C.

On December 15, in Washington D.C., The Pew Charitable Trusts hosted a conversation between Sea Around Us’ Daniel Pauly and Juliet Eilperin, a White House correspondent for The Washington Post. The event marked a 15-year partnership between Pew and Sea Around Us.

Before her role as White House correspondent, Eilperin spent eight years as the national reporter for environmental science, policy and politics. At the event, she talked to Pauly about his research, and his contributions to science, and his critical approach to the exploitation of fisheries across the globe.

After his conversation with Eilperin, Pauly took questions from audience members about academic fisheries research, aquaculture and warming oceans.

If you missed the event, you can watch a the full video here

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.

Sea Around Us datasets turned into spherical visualizations

Sea Around Us and William Cheung of the Changing Ocean Research Unit at the UBC Fisheries Centre have transformed two datasets into planetary datasets as part of the NOAA Science on a Sphere educational initiative (sos.noaa.gov/).

data2While these data had been previously published in the scientific literature (Cheung et al. 2009, Fish and Fisheries 10(3): 235-251; and Cheung et al. 2010, Global Change Biology 16: 24-35), this innovative spherical visualization option provides for a truly global perspective for viewers at institutions equipped with such a data sphere (such as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, NASA’s Space Flight Center and other NASA centers, NOAA’s headquarter and other NOAA installations, and over 100 other installations around the world).

One dataset shows the predicted global distributions of over 1,000 marine species important for fisheries (Cheung et al. 2009, Fish and Fisheries 10(3): 235-251). Areas on the map colored more brightly highlight areas with higher species richness, while less brightly colored areas show lower species richness. This map shows the highest species richness is concentrated along the coasts, which are also the areas where we find our largest marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, mangroves, and marshes, which provide food and shelter for economically, culturally, and ecologically important marine species. This stresses the importance of protecting critical habitat along our coasts for marine life and fisheries.

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The second dataset illustrates the percentage change in global fisheries catch projected to occur by 2050 due to climate change (Cheung et al. 2010, Global Change Biology 16: 24-35). These data suggests a poleward shift in potential fisheries catches — that is fish distributions will shift to higher latitude areas (towards poles) and cooler waters as ocean temperatures increase. The study also predicts species extinction to occur in areas where species are most sensitive to temperature changes (i.e., tropical areas), resulting in reduced fisheries catch in these areas.

These and over 400 other global datasets and visualizations are shared through over 100 of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s  (NOAA’s) Science on a Sphere affiliated institutions around the world.

You can access the Fisheries Species Richness map here and the Fisheries Catch Model here.

 

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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

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Breaking ground on illegal fishing in Senegal

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Photo credit: Dyhia Belhabib

 

One of our PhD students Dyhia Belhabib headed a study that revealed catch numbers in Senegal have been misreported largely due to high levels of illegal fishing.

Belhabib’s research —a joint project with Sea Around Us and US Agency for International Development— found that the number of industrial catches is vastly underestimated.  She worked with the DPM, World Wildlife Fund and data from the U.S. Navy, in the study that began in March 2012. It was published earlier this month.

In effect, the study has increased Senegal’s awareness of illegal fishing vessels. Earlier this month, they arrested members of an illegal Russian vessel for fishing in Senegalese waters.

Belhabib’s report stated that official reports and fishers’ accounts document the presence of illegal vessels—which are thought to be a major cause of problems for Senegalese artisanal fisheries.

Belhabib noted that artisanal fisheries have increased in both time and space.

“They go out more often and travel further away,” she said.  “It’s been undetected for years.”

Senegalese artisanal fishing numbers have been reported at 80 per cent, but Belhabib’s research discovered the numbers are closer to half artisanal fishing and half industrial.

She stressed the importance of the findings, as they’ll help fishery decision-makers make more informed policy choices.

“These findings can help solve the problems of over-capacity in Senegalese waters,” she said.

 

You can read more about the study here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165783613003007

See press on illegal fishing in Senegal here: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25621864

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25859387

Google Earth reveals unreported fishing

Screen shot 2012-09-19 at 1.24.15 PMIn the Persian Gulf, large, semi-permanent fish traps take advantage of tidal differences to catch a wide variety of marine species. These traps, called fish weirs, have been used around the world for thousands of years, but only recently have researchers quantified what they catch using imagery captured from space.

In a new study published today in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, Sea Around Us Project researchers used satellite imagery from Google Earth to estimate that there were 1,900 fishing weirs along the coast of the Persian Gulf during 2005 and that they caught approximately 31,000 tonnes of fish that year. This catch is almost six times larger than the official amount (5,260 tonnes) reported by the seven countries in the region to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

 

This study highlights the utility of Google Earth and other remote sensing tools for validating catch statistics and fisheries operations in general.

You can find out more about the study here:
Press release from the University of British Columbia,
Web feature summarizing the study from The Pew Charitable Trusts,
Journal article published in ICES Journal of Marine Science.

Al-Abdulrazzak D and Pauly D (2013) Managing fisheries from space: Google Earth improves estimates of distant fish catches. ICES Journal of Marine Science. doi:10.1093/icesjms/fst178

 

Ensuring better fisheries management in West Africa

This week, the Sea Around Us Project’s Principal Investigator, Daniel Pauly, and one of our PhD students, Dyhia Belhabib, attended the Regional Marine and Coastal Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, where representatives from eight West African countries gathered to discuss the status of fisheries in the region and their future. Their goal was to engage the countries in tackling unreported fishing.

By working with researchers at the Sea Around Us Project to assess their fisheries from 1950 to 2010, these countries have identified the extent of unreported fishing in their waters – which is often as much as double what is officially reported.

“Fishing operations in West Africa have been catching much more than anyone previously realised and reported,” says Dyhia Belhabib. “The research we are conducting in partnership with West African countries gives them the first complete historical picture of their fisheries.”

In response, some countries in the region have started to take steps to address the gaps and improve fisheries management. In Senegal, the government has developed a fisheries commission and signed an agreement to improve the current reporting and management of its fisheries.

“This joint research is shedding new light on the true extent of past fishing in West Africa,” says Daniel Pauly. “Our hope is that these countries will now adopt the results and use them to contribute to better fisheries management in the future.”

You can read the complete press release in English and French here.