Project/Role Impacts of Industrial Fishing on Biodiversity
As part of the Myers Lab, my main focus was understanding how large-scale industrial fishing affect biodiversity. While most fish species show dramatic declines in abundance due to fishing, some species, such as sailfish, show an increase. We used dynamic state-space models to understand this phenomenon. Other projects included: modifying the neutral theory of biodiversity; deriving rules concerning chaos in very general food-web models; incorporating stochasticity in size-structured plankton population models. Previous work involved modelling of high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll regions of the ocean; investigating the dynamics of simple plankton population models to address uncertainties in model formulation; and modelling the potential for phytoplankton to modify circulation through heating effects. See my website for details.
The Census of Marine Life is a growing global network of researchers in more than 45 nations engaged in a ten-year initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in oceans--past, present, and future.
