Dr. Villy Christensen, a professor at the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, has been named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RCS).
After rigorous evaluation and review of their accomplishments, leading individuals may be elected to one of the RSC’s three Academies – the Academy of Arts and Humanities; the Academy of Social Sciences; and the Academy of Science. There are currently over 2,500 Fellows, each a distinguished person who has made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life.
Dr. Christensen is the principal architect behind the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) modelling approach and software. The development and implementation of this approach are among his most outstanding contributions to fisheries science. They have become the most widely used, freely distributed de-facto standard for ecosystem-based management, and are used by thousands of scientists from throughout the world. There have also been more than 100 graduate degrees with EwE as a central element awarded at universities globally. Dr. Christensen serves as Executive Board Chair of the Ecopath Research and Development Consortium which has 28 institutional members.
The importance of the approach was recognized by NOAA in 2009 as one of ten major scientific breakthroughs in the organization’s 200-year history, and by Dr. Christensen receiving the Award of Excellence of the American Fisheries Society (AFS) in 2020, and being named a Fellow of AFS in 2021.
He has worked extensively at the international level, producing integrated assessments of future marine biodiversity and ecosystem service changes, as an integral part of a comparative modelling initiative (Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project, Fish-MIP), and supplied vetted-model results for future assessments of the UNEP Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Recently, Dr. Christensen’s focus has been on sustainable fishing. While still attentive to international approaches to fisheries management, such as dedicated access programs, he recognizes the importance of community management of local fisheries. He and his team are working with British Columbia’s Indigenous Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN) to support the TWN Cumulative Effects Monitoring Initiative in British Columbia’s Burrard Inlet, establishing a pre-contact baseline food web, tracing the arc of change to the current environmental state of the Burrard Inlet, and developing tools and knowledge for impact assessments and guiding management decision-making approaches to ensure future development projects result in an ecological net gain.
Dr. Christensen also served as co-director of the UBC Fisheries Centre as it was in the process of transitioning to the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.
Tags: Awards, Ecopath, Ecopath with Ecosim (EWE), Villy Christensen