Research Unit

• Sea Around Us Project (SAUP)

Biography

Dr. Maria Lourdes D. Palomares is a Filipino citizen born in Manila, Philippines, the first child of Nilo N. Palomares and Iluminada D. Palomares. She grew up just outside the old walled city of Intramuros during the difficult days of the Marcos Regime. After completing her Bachelors of Science in 1981 at the University of the Philippines (UP), she ventured into the then new field of computer science, completing several courses in COBOL and BASIC programming. In 1982, she joined the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management as research assistant to Dr. John Munro, then director of the Resource Assessment and Management Program (RAMP) and Dr. Daniel Pauly, then senior scientist of the RAMP. She completed her Masters of Science in Environmental Science in 1987 at UP while working fulltime at ICLARM. This was rewarded by a promotion to Research Associate with the newly created Capture Fisheries Management Program (CFMP) under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Pauly. Between 1982-1989, her tasks focused on the gathering, restructuring and analysis of data on tropical fish population dynamics. Some of the work she completed with her supervisors required several years of analyses, e.g., growth, catch composition and virtual population analyses of the Peruvian anchoveta; and led to numerous publications including software manuals of analytical tools for fish population dynamics.

In 1989, she left ICLARM to do her doctoral studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse with Dr. Jacques Moreau and with a grant from the French government. This move added French to the list of languages she masters (fluency in English and Tagalog; reading and writing Spanish).

In 1991, she rejoined ICLARM as a post doctoral fellow with the FishBase Project devoted to creating a global database on fishes, as a recipient of a two-year grant from the Association des Universités Partiellement ou Entièrement de Langue Française (AUPELF, Paris, France). Her language and computer skills coupled with her background in fisheries science and ecological modeling were put to good use when ICLARM appointed her in 1996 as Software Development and Database Scientist detailed to the FishBase team. Here, she was also a resource person in the FishBase-associated ACP-EU Initiative, ‘Training Program on Fisheries and Biodiversity Management’ coordinated by Michael Vakily (and later by Boris Fabres). She participated as resource person in 5 of these training workshops and conducted two on her own, i.e., follow-up workshop on ecosystem modeling in Nouméa, New Caledonia and the follow-up workshop on the use of FishBase analytical tools (length-frequency and other biological tools) in Dakar, Senegal.

In April 2001, she was invited to deliver the inspirational speech to the graduating class of the Institute of Biology at UP (Diliman, Quezon City), a recognition of her young career as an aspiring Third World scientist. And in September 2001, she was appointed as adjunct professor with the School of Environmental Science and Management (SESAM), University of the Philippines in Los Baños, Laguna (UPLB) and has since co-advised 2 successful M. Sc. students (2002, the Institute of Biology, UP, Diliman, Quezon City; 2005, SESAM). She also held a ‘Certificate of Aptitude’ (10-01 to 09-05) from the French Ministère de la Jeunesse, de l'Education Nationale et de la Recherche, a prerequisite for candidature to professorships.

After more than 10 years with the FishBase team in the Philippines, she joined The Sea Around Us Project (SAUP) of the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in September 2001. She is the Sea Around Us Project member in charge of coordinating the integration of fish-related data generated by members of the Sea Around Us Project (and of the Fisheries Centre in general) into the appropriate FishBase tables. This ensures that the fish-related project’s results become immediately available to the public, as well as enabling comprehensive analyses by other project members. In the same capacity, she collaborated (and continues to collaborate) with one of FishBase’s main partners, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France in enhancing the museum’s electronic fish catalog with geo-referenced localities, notably for old . specimen records obtained by the various French expeditions during the period of European scientific expansion (Figure 1). This led to the creation of a stand-alone database on historic expeditions, humanity’s first source of biodiversity data. She received the Tegner Memorial Grant in 2004 for a proposal devoted to assembling and coding abundance records from these historic expeditions, and thus devoted to pushing our baseline of biodiversity as far back in time as possible. As a continuation of this interesting research, she received a research grant from Conservation International to outline the historical ecology of the Bird’s Head functional seascape. This work is documented (historic expeditions link) on the Sea Around Us website, www.seaaroundus.org

Eventually she was charged with biodiversity-related issues within the Sea Around Us Project, which, with the assistance of graduate students, resulted in the creation of several relevant databases, notably on commercial invertebrates. She is currently coordinating a subproject led by Daniel Pauly and funded through the Oak Foundation (Geneva, Switzerland) whose aim is to provide a ‘FishBase-like’ database for all other marine organisms (excluding fishes, i.e., already covered by FishBase). The project is entitled ‘SeaLifeBase’ and is implemented as a hosted activity of the WorldFish Centre in the Philippines. Strong links between the FishBase and SeaLifeBase projects and the strong support of the FishBase Consortium’s coordinator, Dr. Rainer Froese as well as the WorldFish Centre’s officer-in-charge, Dr. Nicolas Bailly, ensure the SeaLifeBase project’s successful implementation in the Philippines. The SeaLifeBase team is made up of fresh graduates from the University of the Philippines, all with marine biology backgrounds. As the project coordinator, Deng committed to spend 50% of her time in the Philippines, supervising the SeaLifeBase team and interacting with FishBase team members. And yes, this means that she spends quite a bit of her time commuting between Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) and Los Baños (Laguna, Philippines).