by Sarah Carr, Ph.D. | Feb 20, 2025 | Past Webinars, Webinars
This webinar originally aired on Thursday, February 20, 2025. Presented by: Dr. Emily Darling, Director of Coral Reef Conservation and Co-Founder of MERMAID, Wildlife Conservation Society; Dr. Rita Bento, Research Associate, NYU Abu Dhabi; and Dr. Angelique Brathwaite, Science Director, Blue Alliance Marine Protected Areas. Description: Did you know that less than 15% of the world’s coral reefs have been monitored? This data gap makes it difficult to track changes and protect these critical ecosystems. Join us for an engaging webinar to explore MERMAID, a global platform for coral reef monitoring. Launched in 2018, MERMAID is now empowering over 2,000 scientists from 70+ organizations across 46 countries to collect, analyze, and act on coral reef data. By simplifying field data collection and analysis, MERMAID enhances workflow efficiency and enables rapid assessment of reef health. In this webinar, we’ll provide an overview of the MERMAID platform and highlight its application in two unique contexts: 1) Centralizing coral reef data from the Arabian/Persian Gulf for global reporting and 2) Monitoring small-scale Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Philippines. This webinar will offer valuable insights into how MERMAID is driving impactful coral reef conservation efforts worldwide and how as a manager it can help you improve your monitoring workflow.
by Sarah Carr, Ph.D. | Feb 12, 2025 | Past Webinars, Webinars
This webinar originally aired on Thursday, February 13, 2025. Presented by: Christopher Stone and Jennifer Liu of Blue Nature Alliance and John Bohorquez of Blue Economy Solutions Lab and the Conservation Finance Alliance. Description: As countries look to implement their 30×30 ambitions, developing MPA finance plans can be essential to an MPA’s success. However, this process can be challenging and costly due to knowledge and capacity constraints. To assist countries and practitioners across the globe in MPA financial planning, the Blue Nature Alliance in partnership with the Conservation Finance Alliance and IUCN WCPA Sustainable Finance Specialist Group is launching a Global MPA Finance Survey (https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90793206/Blue-Nature-Alliance-Global-MPA-Finance-Survey). This in-depth analysis of MPA finances globally will expand knowledge and access to tools for MPA finance. The data collected in this survey will be used to develop an MPA cost model and other tools that will be shared publicly. Participating sites will receive early access to tools, as well as customized benchmark reports that will allow you to compare your MPA’s financial performance to an anonymous group of peers. The target audience of this initiative is MPA practitioners, government leaders, NGOs and civil society, conservation trust funds, and others who are involved in the financial planning for MPAs or can share this survey with a broader network of MPAs. This webinar will include educational components and a tutorial on the survey. The educational portion will highlight why this global analysis of MPA finances is needed, including the current landscape of marine financing tools and data. The tutorial will walk webinar participants through the questions and data the survey will collect and address any questions participants have. If helpful, webinar participants are encouraged to fill out the survey along with the webinar tutorial. All practitioners involved in financial planning for MPAs are encouraged to access the survey at https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90793206/Blue-Nature-Alliance-Global-MPA-Finance-Survey.
by Sarah Carr, Ph.D. | Feb 3, 2025 | Past Webinars, Webinars
This webinar originally aired on Thursday, February 6, 2025. Presented by: Jameson Buffmire of buoy.fish. Description: Lost and abandoned fishing gear (aka ‘ghost gear’) continues to trap and kill marine wildlife long after it has served its intended purpose. In addition, the buoys and lines used to find and retrieve pots ensnare and kill endangered species and foul vessel propellers. A recent article in Science (Richardson et al., 2022) estimated that more than 25 million pots and traps are lost and abandoned every year. buoy.fish, in partnership with the Global Ghost Gear Initiative and Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, takes advantage of recent advances in wireless technology, cloud services, internet connected devices, and machine intelligence to provide cost-effective GPS-enabled floats that allow the identification, tracking, and recovery of remote fishing equipment. Previous connected/intelligent floats have been limited by the cost and power needs of satellite connections and the short range of cellular connections. buoy.fish uses Low Power, Long Range Wide Area Networking protocols that extend the range of terrestrial wireless networks to cover meaningful near coastal areas – and with the addition of field deployable gateways, vast swaths of the ocean. buoy.fish’s intelligent floats look like traditional fishing floats and are similarly durable and easy to deploy and operate but can broadcast their location over more than 30 miles of open ocean to ensure their recovery.
by Sarah Carr, Ph.D. | Dec 12, 2024 | Past Webinars, Webinars
This webinar originally aired Thursday, December 12, 2024. Presented by: Ioannis Pappas and Tiffany Chan of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. Description: The Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) establishes and manages global standards for sustainable travel and tourism, known as the GSTC Criteria. The GSTC’s Destination Criteria for public policymakers and destination managers provide basic guidelines for destinations that wish to become more sustainable and offer governments, NGOs, and the private sector a starting point for developing sustainable tourism requirements. This webinar will present the GSTC’s resources for assessing the sustainability of coastal tourism and takeaways from destination assessments in coastal areas, including Heraklion, Corfu, Athens, Dubrovnik, and Kotor.
by Sarah Carr, Ph.D. | Nov 5, 2024 | Past Webinars, Webinars
This webinar originally aired on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Presented by: Shaila Huq, Eric Teller, Kris Moreau, and Jona Raphael from SkyTruth. Description: Ocean oil pollution can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and the coastal communities that depend on them. Cerulean, developed by SkyTruth, is a new system to monitor the global ocean for oil pollution by detecting oil slicks in satellite imagery and identifying nearby vessels and offshore oil and gas infrastructure that could be the source of those slicks. Cerulean can support climate and marine conservation organizations, journalists, enforcement agencies, and individuals or agencies that want to protect their waters from oil pollution. Users can find potential slicks on a simple, map-based interface and generate reports showing likely sources of observed pollution, or use Cerulean’s API to integrate pollution data into their own maritime observation platforms. In addition to this incident-focused work, Cerulean is also starting to provide a broader picture of chronic oil pollution globally – the initial six-month pilot suggested that ships may be dumping more than 1.8 million barrels of oil per year into the ocean. This webinar will present Cerulean, how to use it, and early results on global hotspots for vessel and infrastructure oil slicks.
by Sarah Carr, Ph.D. | Nov 5, 2024 | Past Webinars, Webinars
This webinar originally aired on Monday, November 4, 2024. Presented by: Milica Stankovic of Prince of Songkla University. Description: Southeast Asia’s seagrass ecosystems are highly diverse and productive and are potential global hotspots for carbon sequestration and storage. This webinar will summarize recent research and remaining knowledge gaps on the distribution, extent, species diversity, and carbon storage potential of seagrasses in Southeast Asia. It will also cover recent work on seagrass restoration in Thailand – including successes at increasing seagrass meadow areas and seagrass coverage over the past decades and more recent worrying declines in seagrass coverage and health.
