Summary
Our society is becoming more and more digitized, triggering the emergence of new research approaches such as conservation culturomics (www.conservationculturomics.com) and iEcology (www.i-ecology.org). Although both approaches applied quantitative analysis of large bodies of digital data, iEcology aims to characterize ecological patterns and processes (e.g., species occurrences, distributional range shifts) using data generated for other purposes, while conservation culturomics aims to characterize and understand contemporary problems in conservation by looking at them from the perspective of human-nature interactions (e.g., attitudes of stakeholders, human behavior in the context of resource exploitation). The quantitative analysis of digital data has been applied primarily in the terrestrial realm, but the expansion to aquatic realms has just began, and I will present some key examples applied to marine recreational fisheries. Conservation culturomics and iEcology have been used in the management of protected areas, fisheries, flagship species identification, detection and distribution of threatened/rare/alien species, assessment of ecosystem status and anthropogenic impacts, social impact assessment. Therefore, this talk will be interesting for all those researchers interested in marine ecology, conservation and fisheries.
Brief biography
Dr. Valerio Sbragaglia moved to Spain in 2010 where he got a second Master degree at the University of Barcelona and a PhD in marine sciences at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (2015; working at ICM-CSIC as FPI fellow). He was awarded a DAAD postdoctoral fellowship at Leibniz-Institute IGB in Berlin (Germany), and he did a second postdoc in Italy at ISPRA (Italy) in the context of the EU Project MPA-ADAPT. He is now a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher in the group led by Marta Coll at the Department of marine renewable resources of ICM-CSIC. He is a behavioral ecologist interested in chronobiology and fisheries, and he is also pioneering the integration of iEcology and conservation culturomics in the context of marine recreational fisheries research.