Achievement

IGERT Trainee, Ben Fissel, began an interdisciplinary collaboration on a research project that seeks to provide tools and methodologies for implementing ecosystem based management strategies in marine environments. These strategies are inherently interdisciplinary because they attempt to harmonize human interaction with an ecosystem's natural functions. This research will shed new light on the trophic interactions of species within an ecosystem with the goal of providing fisheries management with the tools to properly account for species economic trade-offs and ecological impacts. This will allow managers to better maintain the historical proportion of trophic interactions between species, before anthropogenic influences impacted the food web. Collaborators in the work include economists, paleobiologists and quantitative ecologists associated with the IGERT project.