Oceans and Fisheries Seminars

General Director of Comunidad y Biodiversidad, a non profit that aims to promote marine conservation and sustainable fisheries through effective participation. Interested and work experience in social change and collaborative work with coastal communities, academia, and governments for sustainable fisheries since 1999. Master in Science in resource management and environmental studies at the University of British Columbia and a PhD in public policy and governance with the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

We need to move beyond demonstration models in coastal communities to scalable solutions that create resilience and address marine conservation and sustainable fisheries challenges at scale. Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI) has created Innovación Azul, a digital infrastructure initiative created to connect 300,000 small scale fishers to mobilize knowledge, innovations, and capital opportunities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. This initiative was accelerated due to the pandemic, as small-scale fishers were seeking ways to be connected to have access to information on the pandemic as well as on sanitary and recovery measures. As the world transitions to a sharing economy powered by digital infrastructure, ocean conservation and sustainable fisheries must do the same and innovate in this arena. The next generations of fishers are key actors in this digital transition. In this seminar we will present our experience and lessons learned in the last two years with Innovación Azul, and our plans to move forward.

Paul Venturelli is an Associate Professor of Fisheries in the Department of Biology at Ball State University (and former Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota). He is a Canadian who received his academic training at York University, the University of Alberta, and the University of Toronto, and then headed south to do a post-doc at Louisiana State University. His lab uses a combination of field work, large data sets, and computer simulations to examine how temperature, life history, and exploitation shape fish population dynamics. He is also part of a small but growing group of researchers who are exploring the utility of data from mobile platforms such as smartphones.

Fisheries science and management require data that are often difficult or impossible to collect at broad spatial and temporal scales. The ubiquity of both anglers and mobile devices is stimulating interest in angler self-reporting as a cheap alternative. In this presentation, Dr. Venturelli combines lessons learned from decades of angler diaries and fishing logbooks with a small but growing body of literature on the extent to which data from angler apps can inform fisheries management. Although there are valid concerns about the type and quality of data that can be obtained through citizen science (e.g., that it represents a non-probabilistic sample), it appears that self-reporting can generate usable fisheries data. He will conclude by describing two novel applications of these data: one into the spread of invasive species, and another into the response of freshwater game fishes to climate change.