Niarchos Fellow

The Niarchos Fellowship was established in January 2000, in memory of Constantine S. Niarchos, who died tragically at a young age. In the founding of the Niarchos fellowship, his family wished to honor their son’s love of the ocean and to continue his name in perpetuity. The Niarchos Fellowship is a 2-4 year appointment, which supports an outstanding investigator, whose work will contribute to ocean conservation.

The current Niarchos Fellow is Caterina D'Agrosa, who joined WCS in 2004.  As the Constantine S. Niarchos Fellow, Caterina will help the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Marine Program better achieve the conservation of marine wildlife by using spatial analytical techniques, such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial statistics, in its field conservation programs.  In conservation, where things happen is just as important as the fact that they happen! To further WCS’s efforts in achieving the conservation and sustainable management of marine wildlife and their habitats throughout the world’s oceans, she is focusing on three different projects:

Marine Human Footprint: Caterina is creating a GIS database and map of the global distribution and magnitude of human impact on the world’s oceans. To ensure the conservation of the world’s oceans, it is crucial for scientists, policy-makers, managers and the general public to understand the impacts that humans have on them. These impacts should be presented in a straight-forward manner that is easy to understand and that can guide conservation action and attention. Often, only the direct and dramatic impacts humans have on large marine ecosystems are noted, such as the bycatch of charismatic megafauna, but we also impact the oceans in more subtle ways, such as via pollution runoff and through habitat destruction by coastal development. Even in the obvious cases of overfishing and bycatch, the long-held but mistaken belief that the oceans are so large and dynamic that they can absorb any amount of damage inflicted upon them has hampered efforts to conserve and manage populations of marine wildlife.  It is increasingly well documented that this is not the case and that humans are having profound impacts on the world’s oceans.  Part of her work as Niarchos Fellow is to create a map and an analysis of where these impacts are most acute and, conversely, where the oceans remain most wild.
 
By compiling data regarding human activities in the oceans around the world into a GIS, she can provide a map -- a simple, straight-forward tool  -- for visualizing the distribution and magnitude of human impact and for comparing one region against another. This map will also give us a sense of which places in the oceans are still most wild, as well as which conservation strategies might be most effective in protecting that wildness. By making this information publicly available, not only to scientists but to all of the ocean’s constituents, we hope to create a new understanding of the state of the oceans that can help spur conservation of marine wildlife and their habitats .

Glover’s Reef, Belize: Caterina is creating spatially explicit models of human and biological seascapes of Glover’s Reef Atoll, which she will use to create a conservation seascape that will help us identify areas where different types of conservation and management approaches can be used. Glover’s Reef Atoll is part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef system, the largest barrier reef in the western hemisphere and a place of extraordinarily high biological diversity in the Caribbean Sea.  It has been designated a World Heritage Site and one of the Global 200 Ecoregion priority areas.   The Atoll supports one of the Caribbean’s largest and last remaining Nassau grouper spawning aggregations and provides nursery and feeding habitat for numerous species of sea turtles, sharks and rays, aggregating reef fish, and coral. In 1993 the Government of Belize declared a large portion of the atoll the Glover’s Reef Marine Reserve and one year later WCS established the Glover’s Reef Marine Research Station on the atoll’s Middle Cay. It like many areas that have received formal protection, Glover’s Reef Atoll is still threatened by overfishing, pollution and runoff, poorly regulated development, and insufficient resources available for management and enforcement.  Caterina's job is to help WCS and the Government of Belize develop tools to conserve marine wildlife across the seascape – both inside and outside marine reserve areas – through WCS’s Landscape Species Approach.

The Landscape Species Approach provides an objective, quantitative way to select a suite of indicator, or umbrella, species that as a whole represent the land- or seascape that is being protected or managed. By focusing conservation and management actions on these species and their habitats, the entire landscape will be protected. This approach was developed for terrestrial species, and has been applied successfully in Ecuador, Congo, Bolivia, and North America.  With her Niarchos Fellowship, she will help test and modify the approach for two marine sites, Glover’s Reef Atoll and the Patagonian Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem (see below).  To do this, Caterina will create GIS databases and maps of both the threats that the atoll faces and of the biodiversity the atoll contains.  These analyses will give us a better understanding of the spatial distribution of both the species (and habitats) that occupy Glover’s Reef as well as of the human activities that impact it. By overlaying these datasets in what we call the conservation seascape, we can understand the threats and limitations to potential conservation measures in the area. This, in turn, allows us to design conservation and management schemes that are likely to succeed in the context of this site.  At the end of the day, this project should help WCS and the Government of Belize understand the key elements necessary to keeping Glover’s Reef Atoll a truly wild place in the Caribbean Sea.

Patagonian Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem (PSLME): Caterina will be assisting the researchers who work in the PSLME with GIS and other spatially explicit questions in their efforts to create a Park of Sea and Sky off the coast of Patagonia. As an epicenter of biodiversity in the southern Atlantic Ocean, the Patagonian shelf break ecosystem presents a unique opportunity to protect a tremendous array of marine and terrestrial/aerial animals in a single broad stroke.  Located at the confluence of two ocean currents, the shelf break is favored with abundant food resources and hospitable temperatures that attract thousands of marine mammals, seabirds, and fish to the area.  Some of the world’s most vulnerable and fascinating marine animals, including the largest pinniped on the planet – the southern elephant seal – the spectacular wandering albatross with a wingspan up to three meters, the vulnerable southern right whale, and the Magellanic penguin, use this area as a feeding ground and breeding area.  Protecting the area will help protect aggregations of these species.

The Landscape Species Approach mentioned above has already been implemented in the PSLME, but now this information needs to be disseminated to the constituents of the PSLME, including governments, other scientists, stakeholders, and regular citizens.  She will help in this effort by providing technical support to the project, such as creating maps for local governments, and by conducting further analyses on the biological interactions among species living in the ecosystem. By understanding more about the ecology of these landscape species, or others that live in the same areas, we can develop and fine-tune a comprehensive system of protection and management for the area that is likely to succeed. We will also be characterizing the environment at a high spatial and temporal resolution and exploring the relationship of environmental characteristics to spatio-temporal species movement and foraging patterns, thus producing robust yet simple models of the major ecosystem components and their interactions.