REEF staff and collaborators attended the 154th annual American Fisheries Society (AFS) Conference last month, held in Honolulu, Hawaii. REEF's marine life database is a valuable tool for conservation science and research on a global scale, and we were proud to represent our work at this notable conference. Nine sessions at AFS featured REEF data and/or programs. Several presentations were given to share the latest findings and applications of three of REEF's conservation science programs - the Grouper Moon Project, Size Matters: Innovative Length Estimates (SMILE), project, as well as an innoative approach for REEF surveyors to collect environmental DNA (eDNA).
We were also excited to have three talks that shared analyses of REEF data, including Max Titcomb and collaborators from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), who shared findings in a talk titled, “Thirty years of Citizen Science Reveals Population Trends of Caribbean Groupers & Sharks.” Recent SIO graduate, Dr. Jordan DiNardo, and her collaborators shared their findings in “Investigating Long-Term Relative Abundance Trends of Caribbean Parrotfishes.” Finally, Tim Grabowski and his collaborators from USGS Hawaii shared their findings in a talk titled, “Using citizen science to model changes in occupancy and abundance of Hawaiian reef fishes,” which specifically looked at changes through time in several important herbivorous surgeonfishes.
This year's conference theme, Conserving Fishes and Fishing Traditions through Knowledge Co-Production, sparked thoughtful discussion among the thousands of professionals from all over the world who attended the conference to examine the past, present, and future of fisheries science and conservation.