Gaelic Toast to the ASC!
The ASC Opening reception was held on Monday night at the World Trade and Convention Centre in downtown Halifax. ASC participants received a warm welcome to Nova Scotia from Minister Ron Chisholm from the Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture. Minister Chisholm raised a Gaelic toast to welcome the science crowd to the East Coast.
The opening reception was sponsored by Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, the Seafood Producers Association of Nova Scotia (SPANS) and Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
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| Plenary lecture Climate change is accelerating and is already affecting marine ecosystems and their services. Coupled climate models and ocean observations indicate that the world’s oceans are warming and patterns in atmospheric variability are changing, resulting in changes in oceanic stratification, circulation patterns, sea ice and light supply to the surface ocean. A new research consortium between leading UK research Institutions, supported by the World Fish Centre, is addressing some of these challenges by how climate change would affect size-based ecosystem production in the future, compared to past and present scenarios. This approach disregards uncertainties regarding future exploitation regulations, and focuses on the added impacts that climate change is likely to cause, and on the subsequent additional risks and vulnerabilities of these effects to human societies. We will present the pioneer multi-disciplinary methodology developed by QUEST_Fish and some preliminary results, as well as discuss some of the advantages of our approach and difficulties encountered. |
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| Tuesday's plenary lecture gathered a full house of interested participants | ||||
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Session E: Marine Spatial Planning in support of Integrated Management - Highlights of 23 September 2008 Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) involves the evaluation of the effectiveness of spatial management tools (e.g. Marine Protected Areas) to meet conservation objectives defined for sensitive components of marine ecosystems. It thus operates at the interface of science and management. The first day of this three - day session considered criteria to determine which components of an ecosystem require protection. These involve biological characteristics such as that component’s capacity to absorb and respond to human impacts such as fishing, oil and gas production and so on. What distinguishes the science presented at the session from previous work is the use of ecological theory rather than empirical observation alone to both characterize habitat and evaluate its sensitivity to human impact. Further, it was apparent from the presentations that risk assessment is becoming an increasingly prominent tool to both prioritize which ecosystem components require protection and which management measures are most effective in providing this protection. The last part of the day’s session considered the interaction between human activities and the ecosystem, with a number of the presentations illustrating how the concepts of risk evaluation are applied to mitigate human impacts on sensitive ecosystem components. These concepts will be further explored on Wednesday. |
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| Read Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean's, Governor General of Canada, opening speech here. | ||||||||||||
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Theme session J A wide variety of presentations from bioturbation by small benthic invertebrates to factors influencing the distribution of blue whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence have been shown. A management decision support and scenario testing system for the Baltic was described. It was apparent that although there are differences in the two systems, there are more similarities in the communities: ecological forcing, human induced influences and the issues forcing managers in each of the systems. It is apparent that scientists and managers alike in each area can learn from each others’ experience. |
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