Maria Lourdes ‘Deng’ Palomares is a Senior Research Associate with the Sea Around Us Project in charge of issues related to FishBase, a scientific database for the world’s fishes. She is also the  Project Coordinator for SeaLifeBase, a database patterned after FishBase for all marine organisms other than fish. In her capacity as SeaLifeBase Project Coordinator, Deng was appointed by the Board of the FishBase Information and Research Group (FIN, a Philippine NGO acting as the administrator of FishBase and SeaLifeBase) as Associate Scientific Director in September 2012. Originally from the Philippines, Deng obtained her Ph.D. from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse (France) in 1991 and worked with the FishBase Project at the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (Manila, Philippines) for 10 years before joining the Sea Around Us Project in 2001.

Notable publications:

Palomares, M.L.D., Bailly, N. 2011. Organizing and disseminating marine biodiversity information: the FishBase and SeaLifeBase story. In: Christensen, V., Maclean, J. (eds.), Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries. A Global Perspective, pp. 24-46. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Palomares, M.L.D., Pauly, D., 2011. Documenting the marine biodiversity of Belize through FishBase and SeaLifeBase. In: Palomares, M.L.D., Pauly, D. (eds.), Too Precious to Drill: the Marine Biodiversity of Belize, pp. 78-106. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 19(6). Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. ftp://ftp.fisheries.ubc.ca/FCRR/19-6.pdf

Palomares, M.L.D., Pauly, D. 2010. Marine Biodiversity of Southeast Asian and Adjacent Seas: Part 1. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 18(3). Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia [ISSN 1198-6727]. 96 p. http://fisheries.ubc.ca/sites/fisheries.ubc.ca/files/pdfs/fcrrs/18-3.pdf

Palomares, M.L.D., Pauly, D. 2009. The growth of jellyfishes. Hydrobiologia 616(1): 11-21.

Palomares, M.L.D., Pauly, D. Editors. 2008. Von Bertalanffy Growth Parameters of Non-fish Marine Organisms. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 16(10). Fisheries Centre, UBC, Vancouver, Canada. http://fisheries.ubc.ca/sites/fisheries.ubc.ca/files/pdfs/fcrrs/16-10.pdf

Palomares, M.L.D., Heymans, J.J., Pauly, D. 2007. Historical ecology of the Raja Ampat Archipelago, Papua Province, Indonesia. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 29: 33-56.

Pauly, D., Palomares, M.L.D. 2005. Fishing down marine food webs: it is far more pervasive than we thought. Bulletin of Marine Science 76(2):197-211.

Born in France and raised in Switzerland, Daniel Pauly studied in Germany, where he acquired a doctorate in fisheries biology in 1979, from the University of Kiel. He did his first intercontinental travel in 1971 (from Germany to Ghana for field work related to his Masters) and has since experienced a multitude of countries, cultures, and modes of exploiting aquatic ecosystems in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. This perspective allowed him to develop tools for managing data-sparse fisheries, as prevailed for example in the Philippines, where Dr. Pauly worked through the 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1994, Dr. Pauly became a Professor at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, and was its Director from 2003 to 2008. In 1999, Daniel Pauly founded, and since leads, a large research project devoted to identifying and quantifying global fisheries trends, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and called The Sea Around Us after Rachel Carson’s 1951 bestselling book. Daniel Pauly is also co-founder of FishBase.org, the online encyclopedia of more than 30,000 fish species, and he has helped develop the widely-used Ecopath modeling software. He is the author or co-author of more than 500 scientific and other articles, books and book chapters on fish, fisheries and related topics. Two of news books, reflecting his current interests were published in 2010: “Five Easy Pieces: Reporting on the Global Impact of Fisheries” and “Gasping Fish and Panting Squids: Oxygen, Temperature and the Growth of Water-Breathing Animals”. For more about Daniel Pauly’s work click here; and for a full list of his publications, click here.