THROWBACK THURSDAY: DR. PAULY IN THE WHITE HOUSE SCIENCE FORUM

Dr. Daniel Pauly at a White House event on citizen science. (Source: Sea Around Us)

We take pride as SeaLifeBase’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly speaks in the recently held discussion of the Oceans and Coasts session of the “Open Science and Innovation: Of the people, by the people, for the people”, a live-webcast forum of the White House held last September 30, 2015. The event was hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Domestic Policy Council, having three objectives: (1) to celebrate the successes of citizen science and crowdsourcing; (2) to raise awareness of the benefits these innovative approaches can deliver and; (3) to motivate more Federal agencies and Americans to take advantage of these approaches [1].

In this forum, Dr. Pauly presented FishBase and briefly discussed the efforts of its project staff in the Philippines in gathering and extracting data from vast references in order to make information on all fishes become freely available to the world through the database. FishBase, an online information system founded more than 25 years ago, has grown to become one of the largest global database sources (GSDs) that provides systematic information on all fishes of the world including Etheostoma obama and Teleogramma obamaorum, two species of fish named in honor of President Obama. The database has received almost 50 million hits from over half a million users in a month and has been cited by more than 5000 scientific studies over the past decade, based from the Google scholar [2].

The forum was participated by respected citizen science professionals, researchers, stakeholders from different levels of the government, acadaemia as well as the non-profits and private sectors. It is such an honor for the whole FishBase team to be recognized as a successful science project by the White House. SeaLifeBase and  the whole FishBase Information and Research Group Inc. (FIN) family are very proud of what FishBase, with its founders, Dr. Pauly and Dr. Rainer Froese, have achieved.

Cheers! For future great collaborations that this opportunity might bring.

Watch the complete footage of the event here.

Links to other posts about the event: for Sea Around Us and for FishBase.

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[1] Kalil, T. and D. Wilkinson.  Accelerating Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing to Address Societal andScientific Challenges. Published on September 30, 2015. [Accessed 10/22/2015].

[2] The FishBase Project Facebook page. Coming Soon: FishBase in the White House! Published on September 28, 2015.  [Accessed 10/22/2015].

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In retrospect: sharing the SeaLifeBase story

The ocean is teeming with life that one cannot possibly fathom all its deepest secrets. But if substantial information is crunched into its juicy bits and made cohesive, it is certain to be useful in marine studies and conservation. 

The emergence of a global database SeaLifeBase in 2005 is one of the answers to making sure that all the remaining sea creatures other than fishes can share the limelight. The noble proponents of this project are Dr. Daniel Pauly (Principal Investigator) and Maria Lourdes D. Palomares (Project Coordinator); it is a joint initiative of the Sea Around Us (Fisheries Centre, UBC, Vancouver, Canada) and the FishBase Information and Research Group, Inc. (FIN). Also, it is endorsed and monitored by the FishBase Consortium. In essence, it emulates the highly-commended framework of FishBase, aiming to provide key information on scientific and common names, distribution, ecology and life history data for all multi-celled marine organisms of the world’s oceans. Its taxonomic backbone is the Catalogue of Life which is refined by expert-reviewed taxonomic data of the World Register of Marine Species.

The SeaLifeBase (SLB) encoding team is based in the Philippines. Data entry began in 2005 with only three research assistants Christine Dar-Sicada, Marianne Pan-Saniano, and Patricia Marjorie Sorongon-Yap, under the guidance of Maria Lourdes Palomares. The AquaSpecies Workshop was a good starting point for SLB as it formed collaborations with marine experts around the globe. Determined to make the database a reality, the SLB team completed more than 11,500 species, specifically marine mammals, marine reptiles, marine worms and other small groups.

The wait was over as SeaLifeBase finally became a searchable online information system in 2008. It secured the domain www.sealifebase.org, reaching 13,000 hits per month during the first six months.  Widening its presence in the marine scientific community was made possible  as it was introduced in the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Spain. 

In 2010, SeaLifeBase ventured into documenting the marine biodiversity of South China Sea, the large marine ecosystem that contains the Coral Triangle. Then on, it successfully provided mandatory information to almost 50,000 species. Resolute to achieve a firm footing, SLB shifted its target goal into working one marine ecosystem at a time, with its long-term goal of covering all 66 large marine ecosystems.

The decision to accomplish one ecosystem at a time was a heyday for SeaLifeBase, and most importantly to our precious marine folks. SLB became a vital advocate in putting a stop to drilling in Belize barrier reef when the team was commissioned in 2011 to provide key data on its marine biodiversity. Work progressed and other island ecosystems considered as large marine protected areas were covered, including Southern Oceans, Kermadec Islands, Pitcairn Islands and the Mediterranean Sea. Collaborators, coming from 46 countries, doubled to 200.

In three years SeaLifeBase covereded eight island ecosystems: Kerguelen, Crozet, Terre Adélie, Kermadec, Easter, Pitcairn, and Belize. Labor in research and much-appreciated collaboration resulted to 94,326 species pumped up with ecological and biological information. In 2012, it reached a monthly average of 2,772,669 hits with 8,792 unique visitors.

Sailing forward on island ecosystem projects from 2013 to the present, more commissioned work on  the Sailish, Baltic, and North Seas, some major Mediterranean Islands, the Western Indian Ocean, French Polynesia, Palau and New Caledonia were completed. For the entire 2014, SLB garnered 12,238,587 hits with 129,775 unique users. 

Today, SLB  hosts information for all non-fish marine vertebrates, tunicates, cephalopods and other small groups of mollusks and jellyfishes. Aside from nomenclature and distribution data, SLB actively provides information on population dynamics, trophic ecology, and abundance.

As of August 2015, SeaLifeBase contains over 71,500 species (57,090 species with ecology information, 48,767 species for 170 marine ecosystems, 56,578 species with reproduction information, 1,918 species with morphological data) described by 34,587 common names, with 15,354 food item records, 515 diet records, 9,090 abundance records, 4,561 predator records, 3,040 growth records, 1,604 introduction records and 12,342 pictures gathered from 24,621 references. Moreover, SLB has garnered 260 collaborators worldwide.

Embracing the gift of sharing free and relevant information its proponents have perpetuated, SeaLifeBase with its seven members alongside their project coordinator, will carry on and pursue its goal – forming meaningful collaborations, tapping what is available, and providing relevant and far-reaching information to attain its long-term goal of completing all large marine ecosystems. 

13th Annual FishBase Symposium centers on harnessing global information databases for teaching and research

For more than a decade now, the FishBase Symposium is being held in tandem with the FishBase Consortium Annual Meeting. This year, the 13th Annual Symposium will be celebrating the 25th year of FishBase and 10th year of SeaLifeBase.

The annual FishBase Symposium will be held here in the Philippines in Los Baños from September 1 to 4, with FishBase Information Research Group, Inc. (FIN) as the host. The event is generously sponsored by Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), Bureau of Agricultural Research (BAR), Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Developmet (PCAARDD) , Oceana, WorldFish, SEARCA, Biodiversity Management Bureau, Asian Development Bank, Asean Centre for Biodiversity, Manila Ocean Park,  Mundus maris, World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International - Philippines. This year’s theme, “FishBase and SeaLifeBase for Teaching and Research in Aquatic Science” will focus on how FishBase and SeaLifeBase can be utilized as powerful tools in teaching and research in the Philippines as well as increasing public awareness on the databases, promoting their various applications in sustainable fisheries management, biodiversity conservation and environmental protection.

FIN is guided scientifically by a Consortium of 10 international members, i.e. three European natural history museums (Swedish Museum of Natural History [Stockholm, Sweden], Royal Museum for Central Africa [Tervuren, Belgium], and Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle [Paris, France]); four universities (Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel [Kiel, Germany], Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia [Vancouver, Canada], and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki [Thessaloniki, Greece], Universidade Federal de Sergipe [Sergipe, Brazil]; and three non-government organisations (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [Rome, Italy], WorldFish [Penang, Malaysia], and Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences [Beijing, China]) 

Attending this four-day event at IRRI, College, Los Baños, Laguna are invited speakers from local universities and research institutions, representatives of partner institutions, FishBase Consortium members themselves, and students from universities and secondary schools in the Philippines. 

Among the notable guests is Dr. Daniel Pauly, a world-renowned fisheries biologist. He is the co-proponent (alongside Dr. Rainer Froese) of FishBase, the highly successful database on all fishes of the world and the Principal Investigator of SeaLifeBase, a flourishing complementary database which documents all non-fish marine organisms. An outlier and a true hero in the fisheries sector, he has bravely filled the void in world’s fisheries. While most conform in regulatory agencies with skewed systems, he and his colleagues have looked at the larger picture, repeatedly being upfront on reporting that fish stocks are plummeting worldwide. He stressed that a considerable reduction in global fishing and a firm stand on “no take” zones are crucial for fisheries to thrive. His contributions to fisheries are insurmountable. He co-developed concepts, methods and software which are documented in over 500 scientific and general-interest publications and used by ocean experts throughout the world. With so much on his plate, he even teaches an array of courses at the Fisheries Centre and Zoology, University of British Columbia and handles graduate students in four languages on five continents. No wonder his career has been highly commended in various profiles like Nature and New York Times, to name a few. Recently he was invited in TedXSydney wherein he unfolded the obvious gap between the reported global catch and the much higher reconstructed global catch. Since 1999, he has served as the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us, working towards mitigating the impacts of fisheries on the world’s marine ecosystems.

The 13th Annual FishBase Symposium will be held on September 1, and will focus on paper presentations both international and local. Dr. Daniel Pauly will give the key note address with the theme “FishBase: an improbable success, and what it inspired.” Dr. Cornelia Nauen of Mundus Maris, Belgium will lead the inspirational talk. FishBase Consortium members who themselves are presentors will share their experiences and insights in using FishBase to supplement teaching and research activities. They are Dr. Rainer Froese, FishBase Consortium Coordinator, Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, Germany; Dr. Nicolas Bailly, Helenic Centre for Marine Research, Greece; Dr. Jos Snoeks, Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale, Belgium; Dr. Kosta Stergiou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Dr. Kátia Freire, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil; Dr. Markus Skyttner, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Sweden; Dr. Fumito Muto, Tokai University, Japan; Dr. Mathieu Colleter, University of British Columbia, Canada; and Ms. Regina Bacalso, ECOFISH-USAID. 

Local presentors will come from five distinguished research institutions and two state universities. They will talk about their work and how FishBase and SeaLifeBase have contributed or can contribute to teaching and research. Speakers are Dr. Reiner Wassmann, International Rice Research Institute; Dr. Rex Montebon, Conservation International-Philippines; Dr. Adelaida Palma, NFRDI-BFAR; Mr. Christian Elloran, ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity; Mr. Patrick Co, World Wildlife Fund Philippines; Dr. Benjamin Vallejo, Jr., UP Diliman; and Dr. Asuncion de Guzman, Mindanao State University Naawan. Dr. Maria Lourdes Palomares, SeaLifeBase Project coordinator, will conclude the symposium. 

Other anniversary celebration activities from September 1 to 4 include a poster exhibit of FishBase and SeaLifebBase, a book-giving activity to local libraries, students’ hands-on orientation on FishBase and SeaLifeBase, and an art competition – poster-making and digital photo contests – expressing underwater relationships and connections. A workshop on “New Technology for small scale fisheries data collection” will be sponsored by Oceana on September 4 and will be led by Dr. Stephen Box of Smithsonian Institution, USA. 

This anniversary event is also a tribute to honor the donors, partners and collaborators who have extended their support through the years to provide, free of charge to the public, these comprehensive information systems with key data on all aquatic organisms of the world.

Dr. Pauly's latest updates: Global marine fisheries true catch

Do you want to get updated about the reconstruction efforts on the annual global fish harvests?

On April 17, Dr. Daniel Pauly, Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us and the SeaLifeBase Project, will be presenting:

"Reconstructing the global marine fisheries catch: the main findings so far"

Time: 11am

Location: AERL 120, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada

This will be the last Fisheries Centre Seminar talk this semester. Don’t miss this chance. Everyone is very much welcome to attend.

The secret of giving bad presentations

Communication is a basic and vital part of interpersonal relations. Yet while we do it every minute every single day, not everyone can be effective in getting their thoughts across. In settings such as seminars and conferences, the ultimate goal of a speaker is to successfully convey his ideas clearly to the audience. It is particularly challenging when a topic is technical, but thanks to technology, a visual presentation is now possible and is actually an essential tool for the modern speaker. Now the question is: how can you make your presentation effective?

The two C's to keep in mind are: clarity and conciseness. Graphs, for one, are easiest to use to show the relationships between at least two variables. But with so many chart types, which one should you use? With so much formatting options available, how would you best present your graph?

Graphs and other presentation essentials: what is the best representation?

Get a few tips on making your presentation visually engaging from UBC Fisheries Centre Professor and SeaLifeBase Project Principal Investigator Daniel Pauly as he talks about "Bad Grafs: an essential part of bad presentations".

Happy learning!

University of Alicante awards Daniel Pauly an honorary doctorate

Dr. Pauly at the awarding of an honorary doctorate from the
University of  Alicante (Spain) last January 28, 2013. Source

Esteemed fisheries scientist Dr. Daniel Pauly was recently awarded as the new Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Alicante (UA).

Known for his work on studying human impacts on global fisheries, Dr. Pauly is a forerunner of the ecosystem approach to fisheries management, co-developing simulation toolkits such as Ecopath, Ecosim and EcoSpace to offer a new perspective in managing fisheries.

Dr. Pauly is a co-maker of FishBase and currently the SeaLifeBase Project’s beloved Principal Investigator. The SeaLifeBase Project follows the FishBase example of a global biodiversity information system for the rest of the animals in the oceans.

Congratulations, DP!


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Fishing Down the Marine Food Web

A visual presentation  by Hans Hillewaert, 
as inspired by the work of Daniel Pauly.

The phrase "fishing down the food web" has been very popular in the fisheries industry since the late 1990's, but it is definitely far from being a cliché.

Introduced in this article by Pauly et al. (1998), this phrase simply mean that over time, traditional fisheries has exploited the stocks of large predatory fishes and has now moved on to smaller species, oftentimes farther or deeper in the ocean (sometimes both).

Pauly believes that with this continuing decline, it won't be long before people would start having jellyfish sandwiches. Yikes! Can you imagine yourself having jellyfish meals?

To learn more about this concept, visit www.fishingdown.org. It is recently launched by the Sea Around Us Project to present case studies from around the world that have largely been ignored in the objections to fishing down, and present a brief response to these objections which are largely based on misunderstandings and allegations.

Happy learning!

Written by:

Lealde Pacres-Urriquia

Research Assistant

The SeaLifeBase Project

Publication in the Nature Climate Change

SeaLifeBase Principal Investigator Daniel Pauly and Project Coordinator Deng Palomares are co-authors in an article recently published in Nature Climate Change (NCC). Entitled "Shrinking of fishes exacerbates impacts of global ocean changes on marine ecosystems," the paper talks about how changes in biogeochemical properties directly affect the ecophysiology of marine water-breathing organisms. In simpler terms, it shows how global warming affect the distribution and reproduction of fishes, notably how fish across different species decrease in size with the continuing rise of water temperature. The data used in this paper was based heavily on FishBase growth data.

This study has been featured by the BBC News.
To access the full paper, click here.

New publication in PLOS ONE

SeaLifeBase Project Principal Investigator Daniel Pauly and SeaLifeBase Project Coordinator Maria Lourdes Palomares are co-authors in a new publication entitled "Gaining Perspective on What We’ve Lost: The Reliability of Encoded Anecdotes in Historical Ecology", published in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Abstract:

Historical data are essential in fisheries management and conservation, especially for species that suffered significant population declines prior to ecological data collection. Within the field of historical marine ecology, studies have relied on anecdotal evidence, such as written accounts by explorers and interviews of different generations of resource users, to demonstrate the former abundance of certain species and the extent of their ranges. Yet, do we all agree on how these anecdotes are interpreted? This study examines the way that different people interpret anecdotes extracted from historical narratives. We outsource a survey to 50 randomly selected people using Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) and ask them to ‘code’ historical anecdotes based on their perceived abundance of species. We perform intercoder reliability tests to show that people's perceptions of historical anecdotes are generally consistent. The results speak to the reliability of using people's perceptions to acquire quantitative data, and provide novel insights into the use of anecdotal evidence to inform historical ecology.

Read and/or download the rest of the paper here.

Posted by:

Lealde Pacres-Urriquia

Research Assistant

The SeaLifeBase Project

Philippine fisheries and Daniel Pauly in Oceana Magazine

Oceana recently released their Summer 2012 magazine.

The Small Sanctuary Approach

Read the article at pages 8- 11.

Good coastal fisheries stewardship, combined with national policies on quotas, habitat and bycatch, can alleviate poverty.

The status of the marine protected areas, condition of the coastal communities, and municipal fisheries of the Philippines are featured. Find out how commercial fisheries are classified as artisanal fishing in the Philippines.

Ask Dr. Pauly: Are the Oceans Jellifying?

Ask Dr. Pauly at page 13.

People notice jellyfish more these days – or is it the jellyfish that notice more people? In any case, more people are getting stung – a rash of rashes as it were.

Daniel Pauly once again talks about jellyfish and the possible causes of the outbreaks. Is it really because of global warming?

Visit Oceana to know more or click here to read the rest of the magazine.

Posted by:

Lealde Pacres-Urriquia

Research Assistant

The SeaLifeBase Project

Daniel Pauly in Synergy Online

SeaLifeBase Project Principal Investigator Daniel Pauly is cited in the July 2012 issue of Synergy Online, journal of the Faculty of Science, University of British Columbia (UBC).

In the article Jellyfish Rising, Pauly mentioned that the scope of the jellyfish populations study can further be extended into a global scale by combining published scientific data with other unpublished data and observations, which can then result to the "best available scientific estimate" of the jellyfish blooms.

Visit Synergy to read the rest of the article.

Posted by:

Lealde Pacres-Urriquia

Research Assistant

The SeaLifeBase Project 

The SeaLifeBase Project Principal Investigator Dr. Daniel Pauly is co-author in an article on the Rio+20 summit as published in Science on 15 June 2012.

Avoiding Empty Ocean Commitments at Rio+20

To read the complete article, visit www.sciencemag.org or click here.


Posted by:
Lealde Pacres-Urriquia
Research Assistant
The SeaLifeBase Project