Holland America Line and Marine Conservation Institute grants support historical ecology research in order to predict ocean future
Holland America Line and Marine Conservation Institute announced the recipients of the 2012 Mia J. Tegner Memorial Research Grants in Marine Environmental History and Historical Marine Ecology. Funded through a partnership between Marine Conservation Institute and Holland America Line, the program supports efforts of promising young scientists and graduate students to study the history of ocean ecology to predict future impacts from human interactions.
The information gathered through research studies is essential to help law-makers, regulators, and conservationists set appropriate targets for marine conservation efforts that take into account the sustained health and productivity of the world's oceans.
The 2012 Mia J. Tegner Memorial Research Grant Recipients are:
• Canan Cakirar, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
– 'Confronting the 'myth of the bitter sea': pre-historic exploitation of the eastern Mediterranean seascape."
• Jock Currie, University of Cape Town
– " Reconstructing baselines prior to industrial fishing in South Africa — supporting the implementation of offshore marine protected areas."
• Luis A. Huckstadt, University of California Santa Cruz –
"Is a century of human intervention enough to change the ecology of an Antarctic marine top predator: the Weddell seal?"
• Alexis M. Jackson, University of California Santa Cruz
– "Molecular approaches to better monitor population sizes and the impact of Marine Protected Areas on commercial species lacking baseline fisheries data."
The grant program is a tribute to Dr. Mia J. Tegner, a marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who died in January 2001 while diving off the Southern California coast.