Category: CRMG updates (Page 2 of 3)

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Protecting Covid-hit fishing communities in Peru

December 14, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

A project is led by Dr Mark James and Dr Tania Mendo of the School of Biology has been awarded a grant of nearly £300,000 to help protect the livelihoods of fishing communities in Peru hit by Covid-19.

Peru is one of the world’s worst Covid-19 impacted countries. High levels of labour informality drive the need for people to work, undermining disease containment. This is particularly acute in the fishing and seafood supply sector where there are limited economic alternatives.

This new research will help address the urgent need to understand the impacts of Covid-19 on fishing dependent communities and to develop strategies to reactivate the seafood supply chain whilst minimising further Covid-19 infections.

The funding of £297,163 has been awarded from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), through the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Newton Fund.

The 18-month project will create a survey platform involving data collection, collation, automated analysis and a user-friendly data visualisation interface to provide decision support information to an Inter-Agency Consortium (IAC) led by Regional Government in the Piura region of Peru.

Online survey instruments will be developed and 12 Community Monitors trained to use them remotely to collect data from 12 key fishing communities. The data collected will include: health and welfare, fisheries related production and market information together with other local socio-economic indicators.

Gaps in social welfare, poor infrastructure and living conditions as well as high levels of informal employment exacerbate the impact of this disease in Peru. Artisanal fisheries are an important and overlooked activity which provides employment and basic nutrition for some of the poorest in rural areas. Thousands of jobs in the seafood supply chain are affected by the pandemic.

The project will involve researchers from the Scottish Oceans Institute (SOI) in the School of Biology and the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews; the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia; the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome; the Agrarian National University; Redes Sostenibilidad Pesquera and an Inter-Agency Consortium (which includes representatives of all relevant Regional Government Departments, NGOs, industry and community stakeholders) as well as fishing organisations in Peru.

New interns at CRMG.

August 20, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

Adrianna Pisarczyk

“I study Marine Biology and will be going into my second year at St Andrews. I am very interested in marine conservation and want to specialise in marine zoology. I have had experience working with aquatic wildlife, surveying coral reef populations, and analysing underwater video footage, and I have also worked on several conservation projects in Bermuda, Galápagos, and the British Virgin Islands. I am excited to collaborate with the Coastal Resources Management Group this summer, and I look forward to learning more about Scotland’s commercial inshore fisheries.”

Lindsay Grant

“I have just finished my second year at St Andrews University as a Marine Biology BSc (Hons) student. I am still finding my way to a specific area within marine biology, but my interests and passions lay in science that supports the conservation of our oceans, it’s ecosystems and the sustainability of it’s fisheries. I have experience volunteering with education and outreach, as well as within marine research stations, the behaviour and biodiversity lab within St Andrews University and conservation projects both internationally and within Scotland. I am excited to be a part of the Coastal Resources Management Group for summer 2020 and look forward to the experience I will gain by interning with them, as well as being part of a group that promotes the sustainability of our oceans through science.”

The Sustainable Management of UK Marine Resources programme opens

May 19, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

Delivery of the programme’s objective will be strongly dependent on developing interdisciplinary capability (across environmental, social and economic sciences) and stakeholder engagement. Projects will be required to solely focus on the UK’s marine environment, to take advantage of the opportunity to build on a strong portfolio of related research (e.g. NERC, Defra, Marine Scotland).

The programme’s three Themes are:

Theme 1: Understanding the different value systems people hold when they connect with the marine environment and how this affects their decision making, in order to inform and direct policy development.
Theme 2: Development and integration of modelling tools to support coastal and marine natural capital approaches and accounting.
Theme 3: Development of interventions that support government policy to improve the marine environment for the next generation.

This programme will:

• Deliver approaches and tools on interventions and management scenarios for improved environmental, social and economic outcomes focussing on public goods and net gain.
• Make recommendations on future policy concerning interventions to improve the marine environment and achieve net gain.
• Utilise social, economic and environmental metrics and model tools to enable evaluation of interventions.

For more information please check out the SMMR’s website or contact the SMMR Champions, Professor David Paterson and Dr Mark James at smmruk@st-andrews.ac.uk.

MASTS Webinar series relaunches

April 6, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

As the science community adjusts to working from home, MASTS relaunched it’s webinar series to help provide a platform to keep the MASTS community engaged and to share research.

From the 1st of April, each Wednesday at 1 pm will have a different presenter give a 40 min talk with a live Q&A session with host Hannah Ladd-Jones afterward. All webinars are free to join and more information about upcoming talks along with the registration form can be found here.

All seminars and their Q&A sessions are recorded and uploaded to the MASTS youtube page

New discoveries on Outer Hebrides reveal new reasons for why stone circles were built

March 30, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

New discoveries at the Calanais site in Lewis, Outer Hebrides could potentially change what archaeologists think might have been the reasons behind the building of stone circles. Research by St Andrews, Bradford and Lampeter University along with the Urras nan Tursachan, Calanais Visitor Centre, have discovered evidence of a massive lightning strike at the very centre of Site XI stone circle. The discovery was made during investigations of the buried Neolithic landscape onshore around the most famous Tursachan site. The research also involved a survey of Loch Roag to the west of the site as this drowned landscape may also hold further clues to the life and times of the Neolithic people that constructed the circles. Further investigations are planned both on land and on the water in 2020. The findings are due to be discussed on Landward Thursday 9^th April @ 2000 on BBC Scotland and Friday 10^th April @ 1930 on BBC1 Scotland.

Left image: the geophysical magnetic results showing the lightning strike, the red markers are where each of the now buried stones would have been as interpreted from the geophysics. Middle and right image: the team collecting data in the Outer Hebrides

FishPi2 summary and final report published

February 12, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

SUMMARY REPORT HERE:

https://www.masts.ac.uk/media/36862/fishpi2-final_v4_summaryreport.pdf

FULL FINAL REPORT HERE:
https://www.masts.ac.uk/media/36863/fishpi2-final_v4_annexes.pdf

The summary report which documents the work conducted under the fishPi2 project is divided into a Summary Report and a series of related Annexes which contain more detailed material relevant to each Work Package.
The Summary Report and Annexes can be found at the following URLs: https://datacollection.jrc.ec.europa.eu/docs/regional-grants https://www.masts.ac.uk/research/
The Summary Report and Annexes together with ancillary R code can be found at: https://github.com/ices-tools-dev/FishPi2/tree/master/

FULL FINAL fishPi REPORT HERE:
https://www.masts.ac.uk/media/36266/fishpi-final-report.pdf

Workshop: Introduction to R held for Peruvian students

February 12, 2020 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

As part of the closing activities of the DYNAMICO – PERU project, the workshop: Introduction to “R” was conducted between 10 and 11 January 2020 in Los Organos, Piura. This course was taught by Dr Tania Mendo and MSc Janneke Rasjin both from the University of St Andrews (Scotland-UK). A total of 7 students from the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina and Universidad de Piura attended to the workshop. The workshop focused on data cleansing, data visualization and production of high quality figures for publication. At the end of the course the participants were able to identify outliers, inspect their data, combine data from different tables, run descriptive statistics, perform basic statistical tests such as Analysis of variance and linear regression and produce maps with quality of publication.

Champions of SMMR Programme

December 18, 2019 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

The MASTS Directorate (David Paterson, Mark James and Emma Defew) recently submitted a bid to the recent NERC/ESRC Call to lead the Sustainable Management of UK Marine Resources (SMMR) programme. CRMG is delighted to report that this bid was successful and work to get this programme underway will begin in earnest in the New Year.

The £12.4m SMMR programme aims to improve understanding of societal perspectives and behaviours concerning the marine environment and integrate this into systems-based approaches that support the development and analysis of interventions and inform effective decision-making for marine management and policy. The team will work with the wider research and user communities to develop the SMMR funding call and further activities to ensure that the programme delivers its objectives. The team look forward to expanding the collaborative ethos of MASTS across the UK and delivering this programme’s ambition to deliver real change. The SMMR programme should provide opportunities for the MASTS community to engage with other interdisciplinary expertise across the UK.

The £12.4m SMMR programme will be jointly delivered by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on behalf of UKRI, and in partnership with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Marine Scotland.

Presenting results at the 17th Latin American Conference of Marine Science

December 3, 2019 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

Between 4-8 November, the 17th Latin American Conference of Marine Science (XVII COLACMAR) was held in the city of Mar del Plata – Argentina. This conference brought together researchers, professionals and students from universities and public and private companies from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. Iván Gómez, the project manager for the Los Organos project, presented our current projects in Peru: “Use of low-cost technology for the collection of catch and effort data in artisanal hake fishing in Los Organos, Piura, Peru” and “The Dynamico-Peru project: Generating information for the management of the prawn trawler fishery in northern Peru“.
Both projects involve using phones (mobile applications) to collect data for monitoring the artisanal fishery in northern Peru. The importance of improving fishing effort data collection and catches was shown, as well as providing the location of fishing activities at fine spatial scales.

Photos caption: Iván Gómez, presenting our latest project results in Argentina

Seedcorn Funding Received for Lobster Life-History Research

October 3, 2019 / Hannah Ladd-Jones

Dr Mark James and Dr Niki Khan have combined forces and successfully pitched a collaborative study at a recent meeting of the Institute for Behavioural and Neural Sciences, gaining seedcorn funding to identify the impact of repeated capture during early life on the European lobster.

Scotland has ~1400 inshore fishing vessels, the majority of which use pots, creels or traps to catch crabs and lobsters. Mark’s projects on inshore fishing activity show that many vessels fish the same areas repeatedly, with undersized lobsters potentially being caught and released daily. This begs the question, what is the impact of being caught multiple times on the growth, reproductive success and survival of lobsters? This is an area of research that Niki specialises in. We already know from studies in other species that repeated bouts of stress events can have long term impacts on physiology, such as compromising immune systems, digestive systems, and cognitive function. Effects aren’t limited to the ‘stressed’ generation, either; parental stress, even prior to reproduction, reduces hatching success, growth rates, and survivorship of the next generation and even further generations in a range of taxa.

As both Mark and Niki haves existing relationships with inshore fishers in Scotland, they are well placed to effectively use this seedcorn funding to undertake some pilot experiments to explore the potential to undertake a much larger project. This involves the development and testing of a mark recapture systems using PIT tagged lobsters, together with some basic method development to field sample and analyse a suite of physiological/biochemical measure of acute and chronic stress together with rapid, detailed 3D morphometric analysis of specimens.