I just completed my 1.5-year collaboration with the Humphries lab at the University of Rhode Island (URI), USA. Happy to say that it has been a very welcoming environment that helped me transition to this new country, especially in the middle of the challenging times of a pandemic. With the new work-from-home regime, I had the exciting opportunity to experience working both from URI, but also from my mobile office in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Thessaloniki, Greece.
My time at the Humphries lab has indeed been very productive. My primary focus has been on the Indonesian deep-slope demersal fisheries and particularly the analyses of local fisheries-dependent length data to assess stock status. This work has yielded two manuscripts; one on length-based stock assessments of Indonesian fishes that has already been published, and another one on standardized CPUE and SPR indicators that is about to be submitted.
In parallel, I got involved in a couple of side projects as well. Firstly, together with colleagues from Indonesia, Japan, and Australia, we published a manuscript on the signature of ocean warming in fisheries catches of Indonesia, Japan, and Australia, aka analyses of the MTC index for the west Pacific Ocean. This work is part of the special issue on Fishes in a warming and deoxygenating world that I have been co-editing with Daniel Pauly for the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.
Secondly, I also initiated a collaboration connecting the Humphries Lab with FishBase, the most comprehensive database on fishes, to become the first USA representative in the FishBase Consortium. For that, I got training on how to contribute data collected by the lab to FishBase, and worked together with undergraduate students to prepare diet composition data from a wide variety of fishes as well as life-history variables for direct input into FishBase. Moreover, for the celebration of the 30th FishBase anniversary, we performed a citation analysis to assess the scientific impact of the database that was presented at the FishBase Symposium in 2021 and that was submitted as a manuscript to the journal Cybium as part of the special issue on FishBase.
Definitely a very fruitful collaboration! Now, after a refreshing break, on to the next exciting step; a two-year postdoc fellowship granted by the Ocean Frontier Institute. For this fellowship I will be working together with the Lotze and Worm labs at Dalhousie University, Canada and the Pineda and Ji labs at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA on the signature of ocean warming in fisheries catches of the west Atlantic Ocean. Here’s to new adventures!