William’s research interests focus on assessing the impacts of climate change, fisheries and other human activities on marine biodiversity and ecosystem services, modeling marine ecosystem, assessing extinction vulnerability, developing conservation risk indicators, and bio-economic evaluations.
He completed his Ph.D. in Resource Management and Environmental Studies at the Fisheries Centre, the University of British Columbia (UBC). Subsequently, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow with the Sea Around Us Project. He is currently a lecturer in marine ecosystem services at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, but maintains active collaborations with the Sea Around Us. William works on various interdisciplinary research projects that range from global-scale analysis to regional studies in China, Australia and Canada. Examples of his recent research include projecting global impacts of climate change on marine biodiversity and fisheries potential, evaluating socio-economic impacts of fisheries management policies in Hong Kong, modeling the South China Sea ecosystem, and developing a fuzzy logic expert system to reconstruct historical abundance of exploited fish populations in British Columbia, Canada. He has been serving as a member of the IUCN Species Specialist Group for Groupers and Wrasses since 2005.
Selected Publications
Cheung, W.W.L., Lam, V., Sarmiento, J., Kearney, K., Watson, R., Zeller, D. and Pauly, D. (2009) Large-scale redistribution of maximum fisheries catch potential in the global ocean under climate change. Global Change Biology doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01995.x.
Cheung, W.W.L., Lam, V.W.Y., Sarmiento, J.L., Kearney, K., Watson, R. and Pauly, D. (2009) Projecting global marine biodiversity impacts under climate change scenarios. Fish and Fisheries: 10: 235-251
Cheung, W.W.L., Close, C., Lam, V.W.Y., Watson, R. and Pauly, D. (2008). Application of macroecological theory to predict effects of climate change on global fisheries potential. Marine Ecology Progress Series 365: 187-197.
Cheung, W.W.L. and Sumaila, U.R. (2008). Trade-offs between conservation and socio-economic objectives in managing a tropical marine ecosystem. Ecological Economics 66: 193-210.
Cheung, W.W.L. and Pitcher, T.J. (2008). Evaluating the status of exploited taxa in the northern South China Sea using intrinsic vulnerability and spatially explicit catch-per-unit-effort data. Fisheries Research 92: 28-40.
Cheung W.W.L., Watson, R., Morato, T., Pitcher, T.J. and Pauly, D. (2007). Intrinsic vulnerability in the global fish catch. Marine Ecology Progress Series 333: 1-12.
Cheung W.W.L., Pitcher, T.J. and Pauly, D. (2005). A fuzzy logic expert system to estimate intrinsic extinction vulnerability of marine fishes to fishing. Biological Conservation 124: 97-111.
Sadovy Y. and Cheung, W.L. (2003). Near extinction of a highly fecund fish: the one that nearly got away. Fish and Fisheries 4: 86-99.