Second year of Alba´s PhD research on spatial management and climate change

As part of Campus do Mar doctoral programme, students are assigned an advisory committee to monitor their progress and provide feedback and suggestions annually. After the approval of her PhD plan last summer, FOL member Alba Aguión has just conducted a second meeting with her advisory board; formed by Henrique Queiroga (University of Aveiro) and Eréndira Aceves (University of Duke) as well as her PhD supervisors Elena Ojea and Gonzalo Macho (University of Vigo).

During the meeting, Alba presented the structure and timing of her thesis and the tasks achieved during her first year. These tasks comprise the installation of a human exclusion experiment to understand the effects of barnacle harvesting in the productivity of the stands, the construction of a spatial bioeconomic model for the Galician barnacle fishery and the gathering and exploration of data to produce a detailed description of the management systems present in Europe for the fishery (paper that will presented next October at the WSFC congress). During the meeting special emphasis has been devoted into the bioeconomic modelling part, as Alba will be leave at the end of this month to conduct a 3 month research stay at Bren School of Environmental Science and Management (University of California, Santa Bárbara) to work on her model with the Sustainable Fisheries Group (SFG). The presentation with the committee has provided useful insights for Alba´s research and has enabled her to practice how to present her work to other scientists.