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**For students interested in a part time Social Media Content Creator Position, please apply on Handshake . Details are below: Job description The Institute for Ocean Conservation Science (IOCS) is seeking to fill an hourly position to assist with online communications, including social media posts, website updates, video and other content creation, and contribute to strategies that promote the overall work of IOCS and the Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program .  Candidates must  demonstrate that they have a successful track record in social media postings, understand the workings of various platforms, and can generate engaging content using their own voice. Strong interest in marine science and conservation issues is a strength, although background knowledge in these topics is not required. We are seeking someone who is enthusiastic and motivated, and a self-starter who will contribute opinions and ideas . Applicant must be experienced with Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Canva, and video creation/editing software. Applicant must be detail oriented, organized, and possess excellent verbal and written communication skills. Work hours are flexible, but deadlines may be specified for important projects.  Position responsibilities and requirements include:  Create and generate social media content for posting on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. This includes coming up with original ideas in addition to sharing  program content. Develop a content calendar and strategy for consistent postings on two accounts (IOCS and ShiRP).  Conduct research on social media trends, relevant hashtags, and other ways to maximize success.  Track effectiveness of our postings. Demonstrate ability to go beyond using AI for assistance with text or images in order to create posts with authenticity.  Assist with website review, suggestions for improvements, and updating of blogs.  Respond to program inquiries using DMs and email.

See our full list of higlights here , and more about our two week field expedition using autonomous technology here .

It's essential to stay on the cutting edge of new scientific approaches, in order to apply best practices and devise efficient and comprehensive ways of analyzing data. In June 2024, IOCS sponosored Dr. Liz Suter, an Assistant Professor at Molloy University, to attend the conference to listen, learn, and network. At the conference, the White House released a National Aquatic Environmental eDNA Strategy for the United States . While Liz has kept some of her teaching duties at Molloy University, IOCS has temporarily funded her to work part-time with our research group on eDNA approaches in Shinnecock Bay as part of a joint partnership. Liz's field and laboratory experience, along with her strong quantitiative and bioinformatic skill set and publication record, make her a perfect partner for IOCS. Stay tuned for more updates on Liz's work with us!

Dr. John Bohorquez has had a busy 2024, taking on several new projects with the United Nations, NGOs, and with Stony Brook!   After resigning from his post at The Ocean Foundation in partnership with the International Fisheries Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, John began working with Minderoo Foundation on a five-month project in partnership with the Blue Nature Alliance.  He applied his expertise on MPA finance to develop principles and guidance for practitioners and policy makers on financing MPA networks that protect 30% of country’s EEZ, or Marine 30x30 Finance.  The work culminated in a whitepaper publication on the 30x30 finance principles and a practitioners guidance document that is still in development.  John presented this work at part of a panel he led at the 2024 RedLAC Congress in Saint Lucia in October.  RedLAC is a network of environmental funds for Latin America and the Caribbean, and John’s panel focused on how environmental funds can play several key roles for financing 30x30 in the region.    While working with Minderoo, John also planned and led a workshop here at Stony Brook in June on coral reef resilience as part of an NSF grant led by SOMAS professors Anne McElroy and Karine Kleinhaus.  Inspired by Dr. Kleinhaus’s work in the Red Sea, the workshop brought 20 people from 6 countries around the world, including IOCS Executive Director Dr. Ellen Pikitch.  Over two days of meetings, they discussed regional and global approaches for building coral reef resilience, and have a series of additional goals they hope to complete as part of the project next year. From June through October, John also worked with The Nature Conservancy and Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust on an analysis to update cost estimates and evaluate financial mechanisms to support protection of 32% of the country’s EEZ. This project was an opportunity for John to apply the methods he developed for evaluating MPA finance from his Ph.D. with IOCS in a new part of the world.  In September, he travelled to Seychelles where he led a full day workshop to present results from the analysis.  The meeting was attended by over 50 stakeholders including the Seychelles Minister of the Environment, and the results will be presented to the government this year. John also began working with the Global Fund for Coral Reefs again in April of this year as part of a new post as a Programme Development Advisor with the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).  As part of this work, he travelled to Cali, Colombia, for COP16, the largest biodiversity COP in history. As part of the delegation for the Mesoamerican Reef Fund (MAR Fund), he supported several meetings and events for the Global Fund for Coral Reefs and UNCDF. This included a closed-door meeting for an Ocean Finance Dialogue with member states, international government agencies, NGOs, and other stakeholders, as well as an emergency session for coral reefs led by ambassador Peter Thomson. John looks forward to closing out the year by taking part in a November workshop in Bogotá, Colombia to talk about sustainable finance for the Amazon rainforest, where he will present on his Ph.D. research on protected area finance in Colombia.  He will also travel to Geneva in early December for the Executive Board meeting with the Global Fund for Coral Reefs as part of his work to support the program with UNCDF.  He looks forward to continuing much of this work into 2025, including finding opportunities to pilot a new marine conservation finance tool he published with colleagues from the Conservation Finance Alliance earlier this year.

Ellen K. Pikitch, a long-time professor in the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), was recently awarded the Lowell Thomas Award for her accomplishments in science and communication. Presented by  The Explorers Club and named for broadcast journalist and explorer Lowell Thomas, this annual award is given thematically to a group of outstanding explorers to recognize excellence in domains or fields of exploration. Pikitch was nominated for this honor by explorer Sylvia Earle. Previous winners of the Lowell Thomas Award include such luminaries as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Kathy Sullivan, Sir Edmund Hillary, Kris Thompkinsocean con and E.O. Wilson. “Professor Pikitch has worked tirelessly for decades on ocean conservation issues,” said School of Marine and Atmospheric Studies Dean Paul Shepson. “How gratifying that her passion and dedication in service to the world’s oceans has been recognized with this prestigious award.” Ellen Pikitch is an endowed professor of ocean conservation science and executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science . Her research primarily focuses on ocean conservation science, with emphasis on marine protected areas (MPAs), fish conservation and fisheries sustainability, ecosystem-based fishery management, and endangered fishes. Throughout her career, Pikitch has endeavored in research activities both nationally and internationally. For seven years, Pikitch served in various roles at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). During this time, she built a program to encompass field research operations in 18 countries spanning four ocean basins and spearheaded several successful ocean policy campaigns for the organization. Most recently, Pikitch served as lead investigator behind launching an eco-friendly, solar-powered, remote-controlled craft that gathers data on the species living underwater, called  The DataXplorer™ . Internationally, Pikitch has lent a hand in crafting public policy as ocean science lead for the United Nations 10×20 Initiative and as Special Envoy to Palau. She is an active Fellow of The Explorers Club. Additionally, Pikitch is the recipient of several awards, including the Hope Spot Champion award, the Oscar E. Sette award, the Ocean Hero award and several notable fellowships. Founded in 1904, The Explorers Club is a multidisciplinary, professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration and resource conservation. Headquartered in New York City with a community of chapters and members around the world, The Explorers Club has been supporting scientific expeditions of all disciplines, uniting members in the bonds of good fellowship for more than a century. https://news.stonybrook.edu/university/marine-conservationist-and-professor-ellen-pikitch-receives-2024-lowell-thomas-award/

The t eam of scientists worked for years to devise and reach consensus on 11 Golden Rules for truly social-ecological fisheries. Read the open access paper in Nature's Ocean Sustainability journal : https://www.nature.com/articles/s44183-024-00078-2

https://tbrnewsmedia.com/sbus-ellen-pikitch-joins-all-star-team-to-develop-golden-rules-of-fisheries-sustainability/ By Daniel Dunaief Even as Covid threatened the health of people around the world, a group of 30 leading researchers from a wide range of fields and countries were exchanging ideas and actions to ensure the sustainability of ocean fisheries. Starting in 2020, the researchers, including Stony Brook University’s Endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Science Ellen Pikitch, spent considerable time developing operating principles to protect the oceans and specific actions that could do more than ensure the survival of any one particular species. Earlier this week, the researchers, who come from fields ranging from biology and oceanography to social sciences and economics, published a paper titled “Rethinking sustainability of marine fisheries for a fast-changing planet” in the Nature Journal npj Ocean Sustainability , as well as a companion 11 golden rules for social-ecological fisheries. The researchers, who were led by first author Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter, plan to share their framework with policy makers and government officials at a range of gatherings, starting with Brussel’s Ocean Week and including the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice. “We felt something like this was needed in order to reach these audiences effectively,” said Pikitch. The extensive work, which included two series of workshops, outlines ways to regenerate the ocean’s health and to put people before profits. The authors suggest that fisheries need to address their contributions to the climate crisis through activities that are polluting, such as dumping fishing gear or plastics in the ocean, carbon intensive or destructive, through the disturbance of sediment carbon stores. The paper suggests that lost or discarded fishing gear often make up the largest category of plastic waste in the open sea. This gear is not only polluting, but leads to ghost fishing, in which fish die in abandoned or discarded nets. The authors suggest that labelling fishing gear could encourage better stewardship of the ocean. They also argued that fisheries management has historically focused on economic output, without considering social value and effects. “We take the view that marine life is a public asset, and its exploitation and management should work for the benefit of local communities and the public,” the authors wrote in their paper. Pikitch described the work as an “urgent” call to action and added that the researchers will be “meeting with policy makers, retailers, fishery managers and others to discuss these results and how they can be implemented.” The researchers engaged in this effort to find a way to compile a collection of best practices that could replace a hodgepodge of approaches that overlook important elements of sustainability and that threaten fish species as well as ocean habitats. “Fisheries are in bad shape worldwide and are degrading rapidly with overexploitation and climate change,” Philippe Cury, Senior Emeritus Researcher at the Institute of Research for Development in Marseille, France, said in a statement. “Efficient and renewed fisheries management can really help to restore marine ecosystems and to reconcile exploitation and biodiversity.” Pikitch anticipated that some might offer pushback to the suggestions. “If you don’t get pushback, you’re probably not saying something that is important enough,’ she said. Ecosystem focus Using research Pikitch led in 2004 from a paper in Science , the group constructed one of the 11 actions around developing a holistic approach to the ocean habitat. Pikitch’s expertise is in ecosystem based fishery management. “Fish interact with one another, feed on one another, compete with one another and share the same habitats,” Pikitch said. “For those reasons alone and more, we need to stop managing species one at a time.” Some policies currently protect ecosystems, including the spatial and temporal management of the Canadian lobster fishery to protect whales and the no-take marine reserves to protect artisanal reef fisheries in the Caribbean. Still, these approaches need to be applied in other contexts as well. While some people believed that researchers didn’t know enough to create and implement holistic guidelines, Pikitch and her colleagues suggested that it’s not “necessary to know everything if we use the precautionary principle.” Pikitch suggested that the Food and Drug Administration takes a similar approach to approving new medicines. The FDA requires that researchers and pharmaceutical companies demonstrate that a drug is safe and effective before putting it on the market. Fisheries are making some headway in this regard, but “much more is needed,” she said. Subsidy problem The authors highlighted how government subsidies are problematic. “Many fisheries are highly carbon intensive, burning large quantities of fossil fuels often made cheaper by capacity-enhancing government subsidies,” the authors noted in the paper. “Among the worst performers in terms of fuel burned per tonne of landing gears are crustacean fisheries, fisheries that operate in distant waters, deploy heavy mobile gears like trawls, or target high value, low yield species like swordfish; most of them propped up by subsidies.” When overfishing occurs, companies switch to catching less exploited species, even when they don’t have any data about new catches. The new species, however, soon become overfished, the authors argued. In urging fisheries management to support and enhance the health, well-being and resilience of people and communities, the scientists add that abundant evidence of widespread human rights abuses occurs in fishing, including coercive practice, bonded, slave and child labor and unsafe, indecent and unsanitary living and working conditions. “Abuses at sea continue and more needs to be done to stop this,” Pikitch explained. Additionally, the authors hope to give a voice to the global south, which is “often ignored in many of these discussions about how to appropriately manage these fisheries,” she suggested. A beginning While the paper was published, Pikitch explained that she sees this as the beginning of change and improvement in creating sustainable fisheries policies. She anticipates that the collection of talented scientists will continue the work of protecting a critical resource for human and planetary survival. “This group will continue to work together to try get this work implemented,” she said. “I’m enormously proud of the result.”

September 2024 was one of our most exciting field seasons ever! We have been using eDNA technology for five years, but every single water sample up until now has been collected by hand in Shinnecock Bay, put on ice, transported to Stony Brook University's main campus, and then filtered and extracted in a laboratory before being sent off for genetic analysis. Working with Open Ocean Robotics and McLane Laboratories, we integrated new technologies to facilitate a remotely piloted USV to autonomously collect eDNA samples all around Shinnecock Bay, in areas we have never before sampled. This technology is promising in many ways -- it's non-invasive, solar-powered and climate friendly, and can take samples during both day and night. Newsday and WSHU covered the expedition in the following stories:

In April 2024, Ellen Pikitch was honored to receive the third Freudenthal Research Award given by the New York State Marine Education Association (NYSMEA) for her significant contributions to furthering scientists’ understanding of the marine environment.  TBR News Media covered this story, including the history of the award's namesakes and some personal tidbits about Ellen's background and childhood.

On Monday, November 6, 2023, Stony Brook University held an Investiture Ceremony in the Wang Center to celebrate faculty members who earned the distinction of becoming an Endowed Professor. Dean Paul Shepson of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences recognized Ellen's scholarship and impact on behalf of the University. Read more about the ceremony and the distinguished faculty here.