Happy field season everyone! Just a quick update on what this marvelously giant group of researchers will be getting up to this summer.
Some of us will be mostly sticking around Rhode Island:
Austin will be around helping students get organized and set for their field work trips, as well as getting some writing done and manuscripts submitted. He’ll be working on a hydroacoustic project with menhaden in Narragansett Bay collaborating with RI Dept. of Environmental Management, Jeremy Collie at GSO, and welcoming the talented Corinne Truesdale (MS student) to the lab group for the summer to work on the project. Austin will also be spending a month doing field work in Indonesia and setting up more teams to collect fisheries data on small islands.
Lauren will be helping to manage student travel and tie up loose ends within the bounty of research projects the lab is orchestrating this field season. Lauren will also be traveling to Bali towards the end of the summer to meet will collaborators to discuss progress on our big coral reef ecosystem restoration project with Mars Symbioscience and Hasanuddin University in Indonesia.
Celeste will be working in Point Judith Pond and Narragansett Bay monitoring oyster growth and working on dynamic energy budget (DEB) models for kelp and oysters. Celeste and Austin will also be traveling to Canada to meet with an awesome DEB modeler.
Katie will be spending the first part of the summer in full-on defense prep mode. She’ll spend the rest of the warm months volunteering on a number of shark-related projects with NOAA Fisheries, working on a shark diving boat, and setting out on the job hunt.
Diky will be defying logic by celebrating the month of Ramadan, prepping to pass in and defend his Master’s thesis, and probably still fueling the rest of the lab with amazing home-cooked Indonesian food all at the same time.
Catie Alves is joining the Humphries Lab family this summer as a visiting PhD student from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying with Dr. John Bruno. She’ll be around campus writing up her first dissertation chapter for publication, which documents 20 years of coral reef community changes along the Belize Barrier Reef. She’ll also be preparing for comprehensive exams with mountains of reading.
(So far) Kelvin will be working on two projects, splitting his efforts between Narragansett Bay and Indonesia. For Narragansett Bay, he’ll be leading a review paper on the rich history of models that have been used to study the physical, biological, and/or socioeconomic ecosystem components of the bay. And for Indonesia, he’ll be focusing on the small-scale fisheries Lombok, analyzing their catch data to look for patterns that could be informative for ecosystem-based fisheries management. Last but not least, Kelvin will be cutting his teeth (read: his canines) as a brand-new dog-daddy with his recently adopted cairn terrier named Kelly!
Diana continues to plug away at a review paper on what we know globally about coral reef fish genetic diversity. This requires lots of database and code wrangling behind the computer screen.
Melati will be in Wakatobi, Indonesia for her second field season. She will be gathering data for a value chain analysis of fish species sold locally within the archipelago and regionally in SE Sulawesi and larger Asia, mapping local and regional market networks for fish caught within the national park boundaries.
Paul’s field season is already off and running as he meets with his SESYNC graduate pursuit team in Annapolis to work on their research project studying hurricane impacts on social-ecological systems. In addition, Paul will be traveling to Wakatobi and Lombok in Indonesia to collect data for his dissertation. Between traveling and field work he’ll will be working on his dissertation proposal.
Elle will be traveling to the 5th International Marine Conservation Congress in Kuching in Malaysia to give a talk on her work characterizing the deep-slope demersal fishery in Indonesia. Then it’s a quick stop in Jakarta to see family and back to Bali to her office with her collaborators at The Nature Conservancy to resume field work and data collection for the next chapter of her dissertation.
This summer, Evans will be in Ghana to complete his field work, and clean up his data to get ready to launch into analysis mode. He’ll also be taking advantage of time at home to review relevant literature that is not readily available on the internet but found in Ghanaian libraries in hard copies, and of course to spend precious time with his family.
We’ll check back in again soon with lots of pictures of this (fish) frenzied summer. For now, there’s kelp to measure, perspectives to document, and parameters to define.
Shown here: Austin understandably startled by the success of his recruiting skills. Drawing by Elle Wibisono.