Outreach - Page 4

MARmaED new Early Stage Researcher from Germany will work on trophic interactions at the functional level based at The Centre of Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis of the University of Oslo

Penguins are highly visible species for the public. Their life has been portrayed in many movies. Unfortunately they are also species impacted by climate change. In a recent publication a team led by Charles Bost used long-term data to relate the large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere to the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of the king penguin.

Interdisciplinarity is a central focus for many funding agencies. The argument for this is that only with scientists working together that some of the major questions of today could be answered. In a recent paper, a collection of students and post-doc from the NorMER network explored the difference of perception of scientists in function of their discipline: social science or natural science.

A PhD Research Fellowship in Population Genomics/genetics is available at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences.

1 PhD position in Marine Science is open at The Centre for Ocean Life, The National Institute for Aquatic Resources, the Technical University of Denmark.

Interdisciplinarity is often presented as the solution to answer some of the major questions of today. Master student Djuna Buizer reflected on the subject in a post.

The 1st of October partners of MARmaED met in Stockholm for the first meeting of the project

Two PhD (early-stage researcher) fellowships in Marine Science available at Environmental and Marine Biology, Åbo Akademi University, Finland

The toxicity resulting from exposure to oil droplets in marine fish embryos and larvae is still subject for debate while at the same time worldwide energy demands have resulted in increased hydrocarbon extraction activity. 

2 PhD positions are open in The Environmental Economics and Natural Resources Group (ENR) at the Wageningen University and Research Centre (Wageningen UR). The preferred starting date is 15 January, 2016.

1 PhD position in Climatology is open at The Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques in Toulouse within the Climate Research Group of Météo-France.

2 PhD positions are open in the Theoretical Ecology Group at the University of Bergen. The position commences on 1 January 2016

1 PhD position in Ecology is open at The Centre of Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis of the Department of Biosciences, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences.

Opening the sea areas around Lofoten and Vesterålen islands for petroleum activities is a highly debated topic. One of the main concerns has been to what extent an accidental oil-spill may affect the ecologically and economically important species of fish that spawn in the area. We have investigate how an increased mortality event at the egg and larval stage in cod may affect the population.

2 PhD positions are open in the group of Prof Lindroos at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Helsinki . The positions commences on 1 January 2016

2 PhD positions are open in the group of Prof Möllmann at the University of Hamburg. The position commences on 1 January 2016

This paper investigates the scope for resilience indicators to predict an upcoming stock collapse. We find that economic information, such as profits, may complement biological information when assessing the state of fisheries.

A fundamental challenge for European Marine Science is to deliver scientific impact, global leadership and sustainable blue growth for Europe in times of overexploitation, climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. The Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks MARmaED project makes important steps to answer this challenge by connecting science, policy and people, thus transcending national borders, disciplinary barriers and sectorial divides.

Spatial Ecosystem models can be useful but need to be validated with data. Our study validates for the first time the spatial version of the commonly used Ecopath with Ecosim ecosystem modelling suite. We find that spatial distribution of fish species is well predicted by the model, but fishing effort distribution is not.

In this study we assessed the chances of recovery of the Baltic Sea cod stock and conclude that it will never come back to the status it had more than three decades ago and that the economic losses associated to this new baseline amount to 120 million euros per year.

Climate warming is known to affect predator-prey relationship and phenology. Less is known about competitive relationships specifically in a nonlinear framework. In a recent study, we studied this topic on…

passerine birds.

The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management has for many years been presented as the way to go to ensure fish stock productivity and has been adopted by many governments and international organizations. But to which extent has ecosystem information in fact been included in tactical fisheries management practice?

Many marine fishes experience tremendous mortality during their first months of life. Understanding the causes of this mortality and why it varies from year to year has challenged fisheries ecologists for more than a century. Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that many fishes have free-floating larvae. It is therefore difficult to follow a group of fish larvae over time in the field and investigate which factors cause mortality.

Since Hjort’s ground-breaking work, it is admitted that the survival from the egg to the first reproduction is an essential factor affecting the dynamics of fish populations (see post). Human activities around spawning ground may have an effect on the mortality of the younger age. One of such potentially risky activity is oil exploitation which is on the increase in the northern areas.

Much of our present knowledge on the ecology and behaviour of animals is derived from longitudinal studies of individuals using long-term datasets. The collection of such datasets requires the ability to identify individuals repeatedly over time, i.e. by individual markings. Here comes the problems for Penguins.