Written by Carl M. O'Brien and John G. Shepherd
Joe Horwood (1948–2025) sadly passed away in October this year, after a short battle against cancer.
Joe had a background in mathematics and zoology, which he applied to marine ecology and resource management. He was Chief Scientist at the UK's Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) from 1995–2010, and Chief Fisheries Science Adviser to Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), a ministerial department of the UK government responsible for environmental protection, food production, agriculture, fisheries, and rural communities.
Joe joined Lowestoft Fisheries Laboratory in 1970, initially working on hydrographic models for Harry Hill, after studying Zoology, Mathematics and Statistics at Luton Technical College, and getting his first degree in 1969. By 1976, Joe was working (with Tim Wyatt and David Cushing) on modelling plankton blooms - a very difficult problem today, and much more so with the old computers of that time, with 16k of main memory and 5MB hard drives! He also wrote a paper on predation by oystercatchers on cockles with John Goss-Custard (the ornithologist) that is still cited today.
At that time, Joe and I (John G. Shepherd) both worked as members of the Fisheries Modelling Group led by John Pope. However, the policy-makers in London needed a scientist to attend International Whaling Commission (IWC) meetings, and Joe was assigned to go. He became a key member of its Scientific Committee and a middleman in disputes between the whaling nations (especially Japan) and the Greenpeace representatives (which included Sidney Holt) over proposals for a moratorium on whaling. As a result, Joe also went to the Southern Ocean as an observer on a whale sighting research cruise on a Japanese whaling ship. He later wrote two books: on the Sei whale and the Minke whale.
In the early 1980s, Joe, along with Pope and Shepherd, became involved in a dispute with Bob May and John Beddington over the effect of exploitation on the stability of fish stocks that led to a series of papers jointly and later his own, which became progressively ever more technical and complicated. He then moved on to methods for estimating the fecundity of fish (particularly plaice and sole) that were crucial to the interpretation of the egg survey data used to estimate spawning stock sizes, and to the use of Control Theory to find optimal exploitation patterns.
During the 1990s and thereafter, he became much more involved in the international advisory system, retaining a special scientific interest in the use and effectiveness of closed areas, especially marine protected areas (MPAs) for fisheries and ecosystem management. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (DSc) by the University of East Anglia in 1992. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Joe was never afraid to take on a new challenge and was always utterly determined to succeed. He served on the science advisory committees of the IWC, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the European Community/Union, and on the UK's Marine Science Co-ordination Committee. He was a member of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) Marine Protected Areas sub-group and a member of the Board of Natural England from 2009-2018. Joe had also been on the Board of the Marine Biological Association (MBA) from 1998-2001.
Joe retired from Cefas in 2010 but retained a role as a Non-Executive Director and Chair of its Science Advisory Committee until 2011. He was the UK delegate to ICES and a member of ICES Bureau (its Executive Committee), initially in 2000, and then served as ICES President from 2006-2009. Joe was an important figure at ICES, and a key figure during the era when both the advisory and science programmes were restructured and reinvigorated.
Joe was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and a member of the British Ecological Society, the Challenger Society and the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. He published many papers in peer-reviewed journals on marine scientific issues, fisheries and marine protected areas, on organisms ranging in size from phytoplankton to whales!
In his free time, Joe was an active and fiercely competitive squash player. He was a very private person and a man of great scientific integrity who will be much missed, and his contributions remembered by the marine science community and beyond. Those of us who knew Joe personally will remember him as being firm, but fair, and a true leader.
A Joe Horwood - Google Scholar page has been set up, which will serve as a lasting digital tribute to his work.
