hwelch
-
Animals Facing Greatest Risk of Death From El Niño Marine Heat Waves
“It’s hard to predict which ecosystem components will be impacted. During the last major heatwave, impacts were felt across the entire food web including fisheries,” Heather Welch, an associate project scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz who researches climate variability and change in ocean ecosystems through the lens of marine predators and fisheries,…
-
Tracking fisherman to track fish: The new technological approach to better understand ocean life
“We wondered if we could use it to understand what’s happening to the ecosystem as the climate changes,” explains Heather Welch, a marine science researcher at U.C. Santa Cruz. Instead of tracking fishing fleets, Welch and her colleagues are interested in tracking the fish themselves. Tuna to be exact.
-
Fishing vessels as sentinels of ocean health
“We found that the location of fishing vessels accurately revealed how heat waves impact target species. The tuna mirrored the fishing vessels: shifting north and inshore during The Blob but remaining in place during the following marine heat waves.” – By Heather Welch is a marine ecologist at UC Santa Cruz who uses big data…
-
Study tracks fishing boats to see how heat waves affect fish distribution
“We have so much data on fishing vessel activity,” study lead author Heather Welch, a marine spatial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. “These data are traditionally used for surveillance, and it is exciting that they may also be useful for understanding ecosystem health.”
-
New study finds fishing-fleet movements can reveal marine-ecosystem shifts
UC Santa Cruz researchers show how vessel-tracking data mirrored tuna roaming beyond their typical territory due to unusually warm ocean temperatures
-
UN-backed research team shows benefits of tracking ocean giants for marine conservation
UC Santa Cruz experts and vast data sets on marine mammals contributed to new report
-
Global analysis shows where fishing vessels turn off their identification devices
A new dataset of intentional disabling of Automatic Identification System devices by fishing vessels provides insights into illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing activity.