Members of the Pacific Reef Fish Collaboration
Julia Baum is a Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She has a PhD and MSc from Dalhousie University, in Halifax. In her research Julia examines the impacts of fisheries on shark populations and the broader ecosystem consequences of depleting these top predators. In collaboration with Stuart Sandin, Julia's research at Scripps will address these questions for Pacific reef sharks.
Julian Caley is currently a Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville, Queensland. His marine research has ranged through population and community ecology, to macroecology and evolutionary biology. This research has used many different model organisms depending on the question of interest. Most of his recent work has concentrated on the evolution and evolutionary ecology of reef fishes but with an emerging interest in the evolution of coral symbiosis. In particular, his current research explores ecological and contemporary evolutionary processes that generate and maintain biodiversity. Ongoing studies include the evolution of reproductive allocation and phenotypic plasticity and the evolution of species’ range limits and temperature stress resistance. These studies have combined field, laboratory and theoretical approaches. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 1992 and has since held four research fellowships, at the University of British Columbia and James Cook University. He joined AIMS in 2002.
Edward DeMartini received his doctorate in Zoology from the University of Washington in 1976. His research during the past 16 years at the Honolulu Laboratory of the NOAA Fisheries Service has focused on the age and growth, reproductive biology, and juvenile ecology of deep-reef snappers (Family Lutjanidae); the reproduction and growth of swordfish; the reproductive biology of spiny and slipper lobsters; and, since 2000, the spatial and temporal patterns of distribution and abundance, recruitment dynamics, and biogeography of shallow-water reef fishes of the Hawaiian Archipelago and other US-affiliated central Pacific islands. Prior to 1990 (beginning in 1970), he conducted analogous field and laboratory studies of eastern North Pacific (Washington-California) fishes, including a decade (1979-1989) spent studying the biology and ecology of fishes of the Southern California Bight.
Nicholas Dulvy is based at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture, UK. He is best known for his work on assessing threat and extinction risk in the sea. The threat status of marine species remains poorly known. This lack of evidence has in the past been used as evidence on no impact. Nick and collaborators have made progress toward overturning this fallacy through compiling one of the most authoritative databases of local, regional and global marine extinctions. More recently, Nick has attempted to reconcile widely used threat and extinction risk assessment criteria with fisheries management criteria and has shown that threat criteria do not raise false alarms. He has also made a substantial contribution to evaluating the biodiversity and ecosystem impacts of fishing and climate change on both temperate and tropical systems. His early work focused on the differential vulnerability of elasmobranchs to fishing, and the ecological consequences of removing large species. Removal of large species results in unexpected competitive and predatory release of smaller fishes and invertebrates, with sometimes profound consequences. Nick has gathered some of the first evidence linking overfishing to starfish outbreaks and cascading change in coral reef function. More recently Nick has been leading global analyses of the vulnerability of national economies to climate change impacts on fisheries.
Alan Friedlander is a fisheries ecologists with the NOAA/NOS/CCMA-Biogeography Team and The Oceanic Institute in Hawaii. He has been involved in research on and management of marine resources for over 25 years and has worked extensively in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and throughout the Indo-Pacific region. His research interests focus on the conservation of coral reef ecosystems, including species-habitat interactions, ecosystem effects of fishing, the efficacy of marine protected areas, and traditional community-based fisheries management. Together with colleagues he has undertaken to examine some of the few remaining remote ecosystems, such as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and several central Pacific atolls. Research in these locations has provided opportunities to understand how unaltered ecosystems function, how they can most effectively be preserved, and how to better manage marine ecosystems in overexploited regions.
Nicholas Graham is based at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Australia. Prior to this, he completed his PhD at Newcastle University, UK. He developed an interest in applied coral reef research in the Philippines in 1998. Since then he has been fortunate to work in many locations across the Indo-Pacific including Fiji, Australia, Chagos, Seychelles, Oman, Mauritius and Kenya. His principal research at present focuses on the medium-term consequences of coral bleaching for reef fish assemblages. He also has a strong interest in the effects of fishing and protection on reef fish assemblages, particularly in respect to predator-prey dynamics, and is increasingly interested in inter-disciplinary approaches to natural resource research and management.
Alison Green is a marine scientist with extensive experience in coral reef conservation and management. Since completing her PhD at James Cook University n 1994, she has worked extensively in Australia, the United States, Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Alison joined The Nature Conservancy in 2003, and is currently the Senior Marine Scientist with the Conservancy’s Coral Triangle Program in the Asia Pacific Region. Her role is to ensure that the Conservancy’s marine conservation programs are based on the best available science, and to provide strategic advice for the development of new conservation strategies. Prior to joining the Conservancy, she was the Director of the Science, Technology and Information Group at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in Australia. Her areas of expertise include the design and implementation of resilient networks of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), coral reef ecology, and providing a scientific basis for coral reef conservation and management (through research and monitoring). Her current focus is designing and implementing resilient networks of MPAs in the global centre of marine biodiversity, known as the Coral Triangle.
Alec Hughes (James Cook University)
Simon Jennings is based at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, UK. His research focuses on human and environmental effects on marine food webs and the processes that structure marine communities and ecosystems. Much of the research conducted by Simon and his colleagues has underpinned the development of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management.
Michel Kulbicki is based at the Insitut de Recherche pour le Développement in Perpignan, France. He was originally trained in biology and fish ecology at the Institut National d'Agronomie de Paris and Oregon State University. After four years of work on tuna fisheries and echointegration, he came to reef fish ecology in 1985. He was then based in New Caledonia where he worked until 2004. During his stay there, he had the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Tonga and Fiji. His major interests lie in linking the characteristics of reef fish assemblages (e.g. species composition, functional groups, trophic or size structure) to factors at various spatial scales, from local (reef type, fishing pressure, coral cover) to regional (island size, island type, degree of isolation). He is also interested in developing better methods to survey reef fish and in associating information on fish obtained via underwater visual censuses with information on the environment obtained via remote sensing.
Aaron MacNeil is a Research Scientist in quantitative ecology at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. His research interests are in applied fisheries and community ecology of marine systems, primarily in using practical (read Bayesian) statistical models to understand human effects on fish populations. Aaron has ongoing research into the kinetic properties of stable isotope tracers in ecology, working primarily with pelagic fishes and elasmobranchs. His current research concerns the application of Bayesian frameworks to improve modelling approaches to observation-based ecology and understanding of fish-community processes on Indo-Pacific reefs.
Jana McPherson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biology, Dalhousie University. Her research interests lie in understanding and documenting the impact of humans on species distributions and patterns in biodiversity. These interests were sparked early in her academic career during an honours project for her B.Sc. at the University of Leeds. At the time, Jana was investigating the relationship between a Pacific Island fig tree and the birds and fruit-bats dispersing its seeds, many of whom had suffered local declines or extinctions. Her current research focuses on predicting extinctions in the oceans as a result of fishing and other anthropogenic pressures. Her previous work in marine environments includes baseline surveys of an endangered South African seahorse and an investigation of the magnitude and impact of seahorse trade in Tanzania and Kenya. During her D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, she examined the utility of satellite-derived environmental indices for predicting and monitoring the distributions of southern African birds.
Camille Mellin is a quantitative and spatial ecologist with a background in marine and coral reef ecology. Her strong interests in ecological modelling developed during her PhD at Pierre & Marie Curie University (Paris, France) and IRD Noumea (New Caledonia). Her current work at the Australian Institute of Marine Science focuses on spatially-explicit predictive models of biodiversity patterns on Australian coral reefs (Great Barrier Reef, Torres Strait, Ningaloo and Scott Reefs) derived from statistical relationships with physical habitat characteristics. Camille has strong research interest in spatially-explicit and GIS-based modelling.
Ransom Myers (Dalhousie University)
Nicholas Polunin is a marine community ecologist based at the University of Newcastle, UK, where he leads the Marine Ecosystem-Dynamics Research Group, runs the MSc in Tropical Coastal Management and edits the environemntal-science journal Environmental Conservation. He has a keen interest in the tropics and particularly coral reef ecosystems. His group's research over the last 15 years has made use of large-scale ecological approaches, modelling and stable isotope data to examine how ecosystems are held together and how their dynamics are affected by fishing and marine protected areas. This work has recently taken him and other group members to an impessive range of locations in the Caribbean, Western Indian Ocean and South Pacific.
Daniel Ricard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences at Dalhousie University. His multi-disciplinary background includes a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management from Simon Fraser University and a B.Sc. in Oceanography and Biology from the University of British Columbia. His previous position was with the CSIRO Marine Research Division in Australia where he worked as a programmer analyst. Dan is an avid user of Open Source technologies and is involved in the development and management of databases and analytical tools for the Pacific Reef Fish Collaboration.
Enric Sala is a marine ecologist who fell in love with the sea growing up on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Witnessing the harm people do to the oceans led him to dedicate his career to understand and find ways to mitigate human impacts, such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development. After obtaining a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Aix-Marseille, France, Enric moved to the USA, where he became Professor of Marine Ecology and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Recently he has become a Scientific Researcher at the Spanish National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). His research develops practical solutions to improve the health of our oceans. Exploration is an important component of his work, searching for the last healthy marine ecosystems to gain an understanding of the past and the present that can be used to inform the future. Enric, therefore, spends a great deal of time diving in many locations, including the Caribbean, the Sea of Cortés, the Mediterranean, and remote Pacific islands. His scientific publications are widely recognized and used for real-world conservation efforts such as the creation of marine reserves. He is a prestigious 2005 Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, a 2006 Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, and a Wildlife Conservation Society Research Fellow. Moreover, Enric’s experience and scientific expertise contribute to his service on scientific advisory boards of international environmental organizations.
Melita Samoilys is Regional Coordinator of the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Marine and Coastal Ecosystems Programme in Eastern Africa. She has 20 years of experience in coral reef research in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans, specialising on fisheries and fish biology. In her current role, Melita coordinates coastal and marine conservation activities in eight countries from Sudan's Red Sea coast south to Tanzania and east to the island states of Comoros and Seychelles. Her work involves: providing technical advice and support to field based projects, including the implementation of a new Marine Park and facilitating community-based fisheries management; coordinating regional initiatives, particularly to assist countries in implementing international environmental conventions; developing new projects and finding solutions to critical marine conservation issues in the region, namely overfishing, habitat destruction and poverty.
Stuart Sandin Stuart Sandin is a postdoctoral marine ecologist with the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research focus is community ecology in marine ecosystems, in particular investigating the population dynamics that emerge from common species interactions. Studying systems across levels of human disturbance provides large-scale experimental conditions to investigate how human impacts alter structure and function in reef communities. He has worked across the Caribbean with more recent focus on reef communities of the central Pacific.
Jennifer Smith is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California Santa Barbara where she is studying the effects of various human stressors on benthic reef communities, specifically coral-algal interactions. She finished her Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii in 2004 where she largely focused on coral reef community ecology with an emphasis on how overfishing, nutrient pollution and invasive species can and do alter ecosystem properties. She primarily studies coral reef degradation and seeks to understand how phase-shifts from coral to algal dominance occur. She is also interested in examining how benthic reef communities change across gradients of human disturbance and is ultimately interested in determining the potential for reef restoration and recovery. Through her research she hopes to help develop effective conservation and restoration strategies to better manage these natural systems.
Derek Tittensor is a Ph.D. student in the Biology Department at Dalhousie University, working with Boris Worm and Ransom Myers. He has a diverse set of interests broadly focused on large-scale patterns in marine biodiversity and macroecology. His research combines statistical and modelling analyses with fieldwork. Examples of projects he has been working on include: the effects of fishing on coral reef diversity, modelling deep-sea coral ranges and their predicted shift under climate change, and the effects of sampling effort on endemism in deep-sea environments.
Sheila Walsh is a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research interests are the ecology and economics of coastal human-environment systems. She has done research on marine reserve design, incorporating knowledge of coral-zooxanthellae distributions, the trade-off between land development and coral ecosystem services in Belize, and currently on the effect of coupled responses in the human-environment systems on human welfare in the Line Islands, Central Pacific. She got her B.S. with honors from Stanford University, where she studied adaptation to climate variability in alpine butterflies. She developed an interest in coastal human-environment systems while working and researching on a fishing boat in New Zealand. She gained first-hand experience with conservation as a contract coral reef researcher for World Wildlife Fund in Belize. She is actively involved in the field of ecological economics as a teaching assistant for the UCSD Economics Department and as a visiting researcher at the Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics in Stockholm, Sweden.
Laurent Wantiez has been a researcher and lecturer at the University of New Caledonia since 1998. He has conducted fieldwork in both New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna. The main scope of his research concerns the structure and functioning of marine protected areas and the settlement of coral reef fishes. Most recently, his work has focused on the movement and behaviour of reef fishes within a marine park. Prior to joining the University of New Caledonia, Laurent co-directed a private consulting agency for five years, specialising on resource evaluations, environmental impact assessments and temporal surveys of reef ecosystems. For his Ph.D., he studied the species assemblages and trophic structure of soft bottom lagoon fishes in New Caledonia.
Boris Worm is a marine biologist and Assistant Professor in Marine Conservation Biology at the Biology Department, Dalhousie University in Halifax. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of changes in marine biodiversity, and its conservation on a global scale. He is particularly concerned with the combined effects of overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and climate change on both nearshore and open-ocean communities. In his research Boris and his students employ a combination of experimental, observational, and analytical techniques.