Dr. Craig Smith to Use $150,000 Grant to Protect Pacific Ocean Ecosystems from Fishing and Mining
(Honolulu, Hawaiʻi) - The Pew Institute for Ocean Science recently awarded a $150,000 grant to the University of Hawaiʻi Foundation to be used for a fellowship for University of Hawaiʻi Oceanographer Craig Randall Smith, Ph.D., for his plan to design marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean. Dr. Smith, a professor in UH Mānoa's Department of Oceanography, is one of only five 2003 recipients of Pew Marine Conservation Fellowships - the world's most esteemed awards honoring and investing in applied ocean conservation science and outreach. Dr. Smith's Pew fellowship will be used to design a system of Marine Protected Areas (MPA's) off limits to fishing and mining.
"Efforts to create such MPA's have thus far been haphazard," said Dr. Smith. "To preserve biodiversity in these delicate and important ecosystems it is imperative to create a system of marine protected areas that will be based on sound science, off limits to fishing and mining, and well integrated into the international legal framework."
Deep seafloor ecosystems are increasingly impacted by human activities such as bottom fishing, waste disposal, and seafloor mining. These ecosystems are among the most fragile on Earth because of 1) very low food availability and consequent slow animal growth and recolonization rates, 2) a predominance of delicate, biogenic habitat structure, 3) animal populations adapted to extreme physical stability, and 4) extraordinary levels of biodiversity. Accordingly, deep seafloor communities typically are easily disrupted by, and very slow to recover from, the physical disturbance of trawling and mining, as well as from population reductions resulting from fishing.
The Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation annually awards five fellowships of $150,000 each that contribute to advancing solutions to the oceans' most pressing problems. Each Pew Fellow receives $150,000 over three years to carry out innovative, interdisciplanary projects related to marine conservation. The program seeks to foster greater public understanding of the direct and crucial relationship between life in the sea and life on land. By supporting the ingenuity and leadership of its distinguished Fellows, the program calls awareness to the critical state of our oceans and demonstrates viable solutions to some of the world's most urgent conservation challenges.
The Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation is a program of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science in partnership with the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, one of the world's foremost marine research institutions. The Pew Institute for Ocean Science strives to undertake, sponsor, and promote world-class scientific activity aimed at protecting the world's oceans and the species that inhabit them.
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