Plenary Speakers

IMBER was very pleased that the following guest speakers delivered a keynote address during the IMBER Future Oceans Conference.

Alida Bundy

Dead ends and grasping hands: failed governance and the need to integrate human-ocean interactions into global change research

Dr. Alida Bundy is a Research Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans, Canada at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her main research concern is the preservation of the biodiversity of the oceans and the benefits that they provide. To this end, her research interests include the impact of fishing on marine ecosystems, the structure and functioning of ecosystems, ecosystem-based management and ecosystem-based indicators of fishing impacts and interdisciplinary approaches to fisheries science. Alida has led various projects on these themes within Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Internationally, she is a Vice-Chair of the IMBER Scientific Steering Committee, founder and co-Chair of the IMBER Human Dimension Working Group, co-Chair of IndiSeas (Indicators for the Seas) and co-Chair of the IndiSeas Human Dimension Working Group.

Claudio Campagna

Species and spaces in the ocean: From sustainability to conservation

Dr. Claudio Campagna is a researcher at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). His research career has been as a member of the National Research Council of Argentina. He has an MD from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and a PhD in Animal Behaviour from the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA. He was elected as a Pew Fellow in marine conservation for his work in the Patagonian Sea, where he focuses on the biology of marine mammals at Peninsula Valdes in Argentina. He leads the marine protected area efforts of the Marine Program of the WCS, which aims to extend coastal marine protected areas towards the sea and establish open ocean marine protected areas. Recognising the urgent need to promote conservation using creative communication tools, Claudio publishes widely in both scientific and popular literature, and has served on several national, regional and international marine conservation committees and specialist groups. He is President of the Forum of NGOs for the conservation of the Patagonian Sea, and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of IMBER, ASOC (Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition) and The Species Survival Commission of IUCN, where he is also co-Chair of the Marine Subcommittee. In addition to the practical conservation fieldwork that he undertakes, Claudio is interested in the philosophy of language applied to the environmental discourse.

Jean-Pierre Gattuso

Drivers of, and responses to, ocean acidification

Dr. Jean-Pierre Gattuso is a CNRS Research Professor at the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche, CNRS and Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, France. His main research activity relates to the cycles of carbon and carbonates in coastal ecosystems. In 1995, he began working on the response of marine organisms and ecosystems to ocean acidification. He was the Scientific Coordinator of the FP7 large-scale integrated project EPOCA (European Project on Ocean Acidification; 2008-2012) which aimed to advance the understanding of the biological, ecological, biogeochemical, and societal implications of ocean acidification. Jean-Pierre is also the Founding Chair of the SOLAS-IMBER Ocean Acidification Working Group, led the launch of the Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre and co-edited the first book on ocean acidification. He is also the Founding President of the European Geosciences Union Biogeosciences Division, Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Biogeosciences journal and a member of the IMBER Scientific Steering Committee.

Nicolas Gruber

Warming up, turning sour, losing breath: The regional perspective

Nicolas Gruber is Professor of Environmental Physics at the Department of Environmental System Sciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include the study of biogeochemical cycles on regional to global scales and on timescales from months to millennia, with particular focus on the interaction of these cycles with the Earth’s climate system. The goal is to better understand the physical, chemical and biological processes that control these cycles and to be able to make predictions for the future, especially with regard to the potential feedbacks between the global carbon cycle and a cha

nging climate. His primary research tools are the interpretation and analysis of observational data coupled with the use of models ranging in complexity from simple box models to general circulation models.

Dr. Gruber is co-author of the textbook Ocean Biogeochemical Dynamics. He received the Rosenstiel Award from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of Miami in 2004 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Marine Science. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Alistair Hobday

Climate change impacts and adaptation options for high trophic level marine species

Dr. Alistair Hobday is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Tasmania. He leads CSIRO’s Marine Climate Impacts and Adaptation research, is co-Chair of the IMBER CLIOTOP (Climate Impacts on Top Ocean Predators) regional programme, and contributed to the IPCC 4th and 5th assessment Australasia chapters, covering fisheries, oceanic and coastal systems. His research spans a range of topics, including dynamic spatial management, movement and migration of large pelagic species, and determining the environmental influence on distribution, abundance and behaviour of marine species. This research has an applied focus, and for example, has supported real-time dynamic management of tuna fishing zones in eastern Australia since 2003. Much of his current research focuses on investigating the impacts of climate change on marine resources, and developing adaptation options to underpin sustainable use into the future. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications, with recent work addressing the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, fisheries and aquaculture and evaluating adaptation options.

Eileen Hofmann

Conference introduction

Eileen Hofmann is a professor of Oceanography at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at the Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. She is recognized for her work on coupled physical-biological models. Her research interests range from describing physical oceanography to analysis and mathe

matical modelling of physical-biological interactions in marine ecosystems. She has worked in a variety of marine environments, most recently the continental shelf region off the western Antarctic Peninsula and Delaware Bay.

Eileen was a member of the U.S. and International GLOBEC Science Steering Committees, Chair of the GLOBEC Southern Ocean Planning Group and is past Vice Chair of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research Southern Ocean Working Group. She is currently Chair of the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) project, and serves on the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Science Committee and the Advisory Board of the  Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre. 

She has served on several National Research Council committees, the most recent being the Polar Research Board.  She presently serves on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Marine Research and Antarctic Science, and is Co-editor in Chief for the Journal of Marine Systems.

Corinne Le Quéré

Perspectives on Future Earth for the marine research community

Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom. She conducts research on the interactions between climate change and the carbon cycle. Corinne is author of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She co-Chairs the Global Carbon Project, a non-governmental organization that fosters international research on the carbon cycle and publishes annual updates of global emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide.

Kon-Kee Liu

Anthropogenic impacts on biogeochemical processes and ecosystems in continental margins: Lessons learned from cases around the globe and future perspective

Kon-Kee Liu (commonly known as KK), is a professor at the Institute of Hydrological and Oceanic Sciences, National Central University in Taiwan, China. His current research focus is to explore biogeochemical cycles in continental margins using observational and modelling approaches. He organized large field campaigns under the Kuroshio Edge Exchange Processes (KEEP) project and the South-East Asian Time-series Study (SEATS) exploring biogeochemistry in the East and South China Seas, respectively. He is currently co-Chair of the IMBER – LOICZ Continental Margins Working Group and contributes to planning of the Future Earth Initiative for global environmental change research.

Coleen Moloney

Foodweb and biogeochemistry in a changing marine environment

Dr. Coleen Moloney is Director of the Marine Research Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. Her main research interests are the variability and dynamics of marine food webs and ecosystems under global change. Locally, her research focus has been on the marine ecosystems of the west and south coasts of southern Africa (the Benguela upwelling ecosystem) although she also collaborates on projects on the east coast in the Agulhas Current system. She uses mainly modelling studies to try to understand the complex interactions and feedbacks among physical, chemical and biological processes spanning many time and space scales. She was a member of the IMBER Scientific Steering Committee from 2004 to 2009.

Eugene Murphy

Conference synthesis

Eugene is Science Leader of the Ecosystems Programme (part of the Polar Science for Planet Earth programme) at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in the UK. He has over 30 years research experience. He led two large research programmes examining the dynamics of Southern Ocean ecosystems. His research background is in ocean ecosystem science and ecological modelling, with expertise in population dynamics, food webs, physical and biological process interactions, biogeochemistry, fisheries science. He has undertaken and led research projects on data analyses and modelling and at sea studies, including as lead scientist in the Antarctic.

Eugene heads the IMBER Integrating Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics Southern Ocean regional programme (ICED), developing analyses of circumpolar Southern Ocean ecosystems.  He is also a member of the IMBER Scientific Steering Committee.