My long-life passion for the natural world and particularly the oceans has led me to study ecology and engage with biodiversity conservation from the local to the continental scale, in various places in the world. Interested in the applied side of conservation, I graduated from an international master’s in applied ecology during which I worked on identifying critical foraging sites for Antarctic penguins and evaluating how well these sites would be covered by an envisioned network of marine protected areas. This project at the science-policy interface enhanced my desire to better understand the drivers of efficient conservation to improve policies, a topic I will develop in my project looking at the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving biodiversity in the marine world.
In the last century, humans have so dramatically transformed the
environment in which they live that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch:
the Anthropocene. The magnitude, extent, and rate of change in the environment
is so great that it is often hard to comprehend.
The difficulty people have to realize how much ecosystems have been transformed partly comes from an environmental generational amnesia 1, caused by shifting baselines between generations 2: children of each generation perceiving the environment into which they are ...
Since 1961, the average annual increase in
global fish consumption has outpaced population growth and exceeded consumption
of meat from all terrestrial animals combined 1. Accordingly, fish stocks have been
increasingly exploited, with 33% of fish stocks overfished and 60% fully exploited
in 2015 1. Demand for fish is driven by
population growth, human migration toward coastal areas, and rising incomes increasing
demand for luxury seafood 1.
To identify a sustainable level of fish stock exploitation, experts use a metric called the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY), ...
