| Marta Coll |
| Dr Marta Coll Monton is a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) and Institute of Marine Science (Barcelona, Spain). She is currently working on her Marie Curie project ìECOFUN: Analysis of biodiversity changes on structural and functional properties of marine ecosystems under cumulative human stressorsî International Outgoing Fellowships (IOF) Call: FP7-PEOPLE-2007-4-1-IOF. Her interest focuses on understanding how documented changes on marine biodiversity have been translated into changes on ecosystem structure and functioning, and services to humans, and how these changes may impact ecosystems in the future. Thus, her work implies hindcasting changes on coastal ecosystem functioning due to effects of human impacts, and forecasting how these effects could develop in the future. To do so, she mainly applies various ecological modelling tools using historical and fisheries data and combines it with laboratory experiments and field work data analysis. Her PhD work had been mainly based on studying marine ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea, where she studied the ecosystem impacts of fishing by means of food web modelling and trophodynamic indicators using Ecopath with Ecosim. |
Carie Hoover |
| Carie Hoover is currently a PhD student at the Fisheries Center, University of British Columbia. She is looking at the effects of climate change on polar ecosystems, with her research focusing on identifying threats to top predators in the Antarctic Peninsula and Hudson Bay ecosystems. She is currently working in association with DFO assessing the status of marine mammals in the Hudson Bay as part of the Global Warming and Arctic Marine Mammals (GWAMM) Project under International Polar Year (IPY) funding. Carie completed her Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology (EEMB) at the University of California Santa Barbara. After leaving California, Carie moved to Scotland to attend the University of St Andrews where she completed her Masters degree in a biology-mathematics conversion program, with her thesis focusing on predator prey interactions of grey seals, and prey selectivity. |
Sherman Lai |
| Sherman Lai is the Project Coordinator of the Lenfest Ocean Futures Project which plans to bring Ecopath to a whole new level of decision support tools. He is involved in the development of interfaces and in charge of implementing state-of-the-art technologies on collaborative environments, as well as in designing human-computer interaction schemes. Internally he is responsible for project performance, including tracking and meeting development deadlines. |
Lyne Morissette |
| Dr. Lyne Morissette is a postdoctoral fellow from the ìFonds QuÈbÈcois de la Recherche sur les Sciences et Technologiesî (FQRNT) with Dr Kevin McCann at the University of Guelph. Her current work is focused on the diversity and resilience of ecosystems and the trophic role of predators. Her main interest is to see if genetic diversity is affecting the way prey populations are impacted by predators, and how genetic features of the prey can help maintaining population and community structure through time. Over the years, she gained an expertise on the trophic role of marine mammals in ecosystem, and used Ecopath with Ecosim and other modeling approaches to construct models characterizing ecosystem structure and functions. She is an active member of different research groups with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans of Canada (DFO), the Norwegian College of Fisheries Sciences at University of Troms¯, and the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO). She earned her PhD in Zoology from the University of British Columbia in 2007, and contributed to the Sea Around Us Project completing a database for all Ecopath models available from around the world. She is now on the editorial board of the open-access journal ìDiversityî, guest-editing a special issue on ìBiodiversity, Conservation and Wildlife Managementî. |
M.L. Deng Palomares |
| Dr. M.L. Deng Palomares is a Senior Research Associate with the Sea Around Us Project at the Fisheries Center, University of British Columbia. She coordinates integration of fish-related data generated by the Sea Around Us Project into FishBase (www.fishbase.org), a very successful information system on fish. This ensures that the fish-related projectís results become immediately available to the public, as well as enabling comprehensive analyses by other project members. Since 2005, she is also Project Coordinator of SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org), a FishBase-like information system on all marine organisms, which links to FishBase and other online biodiversity information systems, e.g., Catalogue of Life and the World Register of Marine Species. Both SeaLifeBase and FishBase are structured to 'communicate' with Ecopath with Ecosim for its various data requirements, e.g., trophic levels, diet compositions and growth parameters. |
Jeroen Steenbeek |
| Jeroen Steenbeek is a corporate trained computer scientist from the Netherlands, and has been a technical consultant with Lenfest Ocean Futures Project since the beginning of the Ecopath with Ecosim 6 (EwE6) project. He is one of the key architects of the structure of EwE6. He is responsible for all-over design and quality assurance of EwE6, and handles database implementation, user interface design and implementation, spatial modeling aspects and model interoperability for EwE6. This fall, Jeroen is going to start his MSc thesis on providing Ecospace with a true spatial data interface. Jeroen built the Ecopath 25 Years website. |
Divya Varkey |
| Divya Varkey is a PhD student at the Fisheries Center, University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on challenges for ecosystem-based management in Raja Ampat, Indonesia and New Zealand. She has built an ecosystem model for coral reefs in Raja Ampat using the Ecopath and Ecosim modeling approach. She is currently using Ecospace to model ecological changes inside marine protected areas especially looking at how size of the MPA influences the ecology inside the MPA. She is also involved in collating basic input parameters from 100 Ecopath models into broad functional groups to reduce parameter specification error for Ecopath models and the function of ëmediationí component in Ecosim to capture third party influences on food web interactions. |
Colette Wabnitz |
| Colette Wabnitz is currently a PhD student at the Fisheries Center, University of British Columbia. Colette's main interests lie in marine conservation planning. Specifically, her research aims to: improve methods for gathering spatially explicit information on coastal habitats (e.g., coral reefs and seagrass), which includes the use of remote sensing; understand ecological processes that occur within coastal ecosystems using models (e.g. Ecopath with Ecosim); develop appropriate tools for the monitoring and planning of MPAs at multiple scales; and inform marine conservation policy development and assessment. Her PhD project seeks to derive an estimate of seagrass coverage at the scale of the wider Caribbean region and to understand the role of green sea turtles within these ecosystems. She received her BSc in Biology and Environmental Sciences from McGill University, Montreal. For her MSc in Tropical Coastal Management at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, she looked at the benthic composition and territory size of 5 species of parrotfishes in Belize under the supervision of Dr Peter Mumby. |
