Congratulations to Nereus research fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation! Here you can read the summary he wrote about his research, as well as his future directions.

The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) awarded Guillermo Ortuño Crespo the runner-up prize for seafood sustainability, for his proposal “Dynamic Habitat Predictions of Two Bycaught Oceanic Shark Species.”

Nereus Fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) received the ‘2019 Dean’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Manuscript’ as the lead author for the paper ‘The Environmental Niche of the Global High Seas Pelagic Longline Fleet’, published in Science Advances.

Research Associate Marjo Vierros is lead author with a research team that includes Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Daniel Dunn, Director Yoshi Ota, and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor on a new study published in Marine Policy, “Considering Indigenous Peoples and local communities in governance of the global ocean commons.”

Nereus members Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Daniel Dunn, and Patrick Halpin are co-authors on a new paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, ‘High-seas fish biodiversity is slipping through the governance net’. They stress the need to include fish biodiversity in negotiations for the new BBNJ treaty at the United Nations General Assembly and close current legal gaps in existing ocean governance frameworks.

Research fellows Harriet Harden-Davies (University of Wollongong/ANCORS) and Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) with Daniel Dunn (Duke University) are co-authors on a policy brief published by IDDRI that aims to strengthen the current high seas management and governance framework to improve marine conservation and sustainability.

Nereus Fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) writes about the first Global Planning Meeting of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development that he, fellow Harriet Harden-Davies (ANCORS, University of Wollongong) and policy director Yoshitaka Ota (University of Washington) attended in Copenhagen, Denmark on May 13-15th.

Nereus Fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) attended the Climate Impacts on Oceanic Top Predators (CLIOTOP) symposium in Taiwan, where he presented his research on the spatial ecology of pelagic long liners. Guillermo’s research was recently published in a special collection in Science Advances on high seas fisheries.

By Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Nereus Program Fellow at Duke University

Due to their wide-ranging swimming behaviors, migratory fish, marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle species experience a variety, and an increasing amount, of anthropogenic pressures over the course of their lives. These threats, including climate change, overfishing, and marine pollution, combined with conservation strategies that largely fail to consider spatial connectivity over the life cycle, are resulting in declining populations worldwide.