INVITED SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION
Recreational fisheries are diverse in scale, scope, and participation worldwide, constituting an important ecosystem service of marine and freshwater ecosystems. Management of these socio-ecological systems is challenged by monitoring gaps, stemming from difficulties engaging with participants, biased sampling, and insufficient resources to conduct biological or social surveys of fish and human populations. In the Internet age, online data have great potential to make a meaningful contribution to recreational fisheries research, monitoring, and management. Digital data by recreational fishing catches offer a double and overlooked advantage. From one side, they provide important ecological and social information about recreational fishing, and on the other side constitute a widespread spatio-temporal network of samples that can provide insights on macroecological patterns. I will demonstrate how a dynamic cultural system such as YouTube can be used to: (i) characterize harvesting patterns of recreational fishers; (ii) investigate macroecological patterns such as distributional range-shifts; (iii) explore social dimensions and sentiments towards invasive species. I will finalize my talk by highlighting most important aspects to operationalize conservation culturomics and iEcology in recreational fisheries and biodiversity conservation.
I am an integrative marine ecologist with a strong interdisciplinary interest in fisheries. In the last few years one of my main goals has been to integrate digital data from social media into marine ecology and fisheries management. In particular, I showed that social media data can be used to characterize recreational fisheries from an ecological and social perspective using the emerging approaches of conservation culturomics and iEcology (use of digital data for studying human-nature interactions and ecological processes). This is a paramount aspect because provides information on social aspects (i.e., human dimension), which are otherwise poorly integrated in adaptive fisheries management and biodiversity conservation. I am now starting my own research group as Ramon y Cajal Fellow at the Institute of Marine Science of the Spanish National Research Council focusing on behavioural and fisheries ecology & conservation culturomics and iEcology.
[Host: A. Sofia Vaz, Invasion Science - InvasionS]
