Donna Dimarchopoulou

Welcome to my personal website where I present my work as a marine biologist on marine ecosystems and fisheries. Broadly, I am interested in the effects of fishing and environmental changes on marine ecosystems. My research focuses on marine fisheries and in particular ecosystem modeling, stock assessments, marine protected areas, and the effects of fishing restrictions, as well as climate change on marine populations.

I am currently a Guest Investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), USA and an Assistant Scientist at the School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece working on the ecocentric management for sustainable fisheries and healthy marine ecosystems.

In my previous position, I was an Ocean Frontier Institute postdoctoral fellow collaborating with the Lotze and Worm labs at Dalhousie University (Dal), Canada, as well as the Pineda and Ji labs at WHOI. My work focused on assessing the effects of ocean warming on shifting fisheries catches in the NW Atlantic Ocean with the use of the mean temperature of the catch (MTC) index.

During my first postdoc in the Humphries lab at the University of Rhode Island (URI), USA I worked on length-based stock assessments for Indonesian deep demersal fishes, and I initiated a long-term collaboration between the Humphries lab and FishBase, the largest and most comprehensive database for fishes. Together with URI undergraduate students, we have been contributing fish diet composition and maximum length data from the NW Atlantic to FishBase.

In parallel, I have co-edited a special issue for the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes with Professor Daniel Pauly from the University of British Columbia, Canada. In the special issue “Fishes in a Warming and Deoxygenating World” we have invited submissions of manuscripts related to the challenges posed to fishes by the climate-change induced increase in water temperature and habitat deoxygenation that result in disruptions of their life-history and reproductive phenology, distributional shifts and structural changes in the communities of which they are part. The special issue was published in October, 2022 and includes 19 contributions.