Photo: Cilia Holmes Indahl (AWR Secretary), Dr Christian Reiss (USA), Dr Bettina Meyer (Germany), Dr. Phil Trathan (Chair of SAG), Claire Christian (Chair of the AWR Board) and Dr. Rodolfo Werner (AWR Scientific Advisor and Board member)
On Wednesday October 18th, AWR presented at the CCAMLR annual meeting in Hobart, Australia, the three new research projects that were selected this year.
"We are very pleased with the research proposals that we received in the third call for proposals. As in previous years, the quality of the projects was superb and it was difficult to select the winning projects. I believe that the three selected projects cover key issues for the management of the krill fishery. On the other hand, we received the news that Aker BioMarine (a founding member of AWR) has committed to provide 200,000 USD annually for the foreseeable future, providing AWR with funding stability. We are already looking into the fourth call for proposals that will be opened in 2018.", said Dr. Rodolfo Werner, AWR Scientific Advisor and Board member.
The three granted research projects are:
“Rapid unsupervised automated Krill density estimation from fishing vessels (Rapid-Krill)”. The project will be led by Dr Sophie Fielding from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and her fellow researchers from BAS, Institute of Marine Research (Norway) and Yellow Sea Fishery Research Institution (China)
“Reconstructing mesopelagic fish populations from biological samplers: a missing link in ecosystem based feedback management”. The project will be led by Dr Ronald S. Kaufmann from the University of San Diego, in cooperation with Dr Christian Reiss and researchers from Southwest Fisheries Science Center (USA)
“Concurrent assessment of baleen whale and krill distribution along the West Antarctic Peninsula using state-of-the art census techniques in a synchronized sampling effort”. The project is led by Dr Helena Herr from the University of Hamburg, in collaboration with Dr Bettina Meyer and researchers from the University of Hamburg and from Alfred-Wegner Institute (Germany)
The Science Advisory Group (SAG) of AWR is currently working on defining the priorities for the upcoming fourth call for proposals, which will be released in the coming weeks.
Dr Christian Reiss, Dr Bettina Meyer
Dr Phil Trathan, Dr Rodolfo Werner