Biography

Louisa was born in the UK, and spent the first years of her life based in a quaint little Olde Englishe Village known as Broadbottom. Giggle you may, but we even have a website explaining the provenance of our village name. She left the sunny climes of Cheshire in 1997, and went 'up' (albeit south) to the University of Cambridge, UK,- it is always a raising of one's station to go to Cambridge, darling. There, she rowed like a crazy woman, was a Midshipman in the University Royal Naval Unit, and was a member of various silly clubs with equally silly names (although none quite as silly as Broadbottom). In the midst of this she also obtained her BA (Hons) in Zoology (First Class, USC College Prize) in 2000, specializing in vertebrate evolution, aquatic ecology and behavioural ecology. While the focus of these subjects was not marine, they triggered her interest in conservation and fish - and thereby fisheries management.

Louisa's undergraduate degree also evoked a desire to convey to others the appreciation of the natural world that she had developed during her degree, and to this end she pursued a career in natural history film production. She had various voluntary positions at the BBC Natural History Unit, and made a (really quite terrible) 5 minute film on the Wellington Tree Weta (an ancient relative of the grasshopper, endemic to New Zealand). In 2000-2001 she worked for a French production company in Marseille, France.

From Marseille, Louisa worked as a voluntary field assistant on Aride Island Special Reserve in the Republic of Seychelles for 3 months. She then returned to the UK to obtain her MSc in Tropical Coastal Management (with Distinction) at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, in 2001-2, with the support of a full Natural Environment Research Council studentship. During her MSc, Louisa developed a keen interest in the role of marine protected areas in fisheries management and biodiversity conservation as a whole. Her research project looked at fisher perceptions of, and behaviour towards, marine protected areas in the Inner Islands of the Republic of Seychelles.

Louisa came to the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre in 2002 as a research assistant, looking at global illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing within the Sea Around Us Project. In September 2003, she entered the doctoral program under the supervison of Prof Daniel Pauly. Her project falls within the Sea Around Us Project (SAUP) and is the result of a formal collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF; International and Canada), UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) and the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA). The project has two main goals: firstly, to perform a global and extended analysis of existing marine protected areas. Using the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), maintained by WCMC, as a base, Louisa has developed MPA Global, a database of the world's marine protected areas, which is available directly at www.mpaglobal.org, or through www.seaaroundus.org. MPA Global has undergone substantial editing and review, and currently contains information on around 4600 MPAs. The second objective of her PhD is to develop various scenarios of global marine protection, in which varying proportions of marine habitat are protected (from 10 to 30%, in accordance with various broad-scale marine protection targets). The purpose of this analysis, which will make use of Multicriteria Evaluation (MCE), is not to produce prescriptive results, but rather, provide a suite of alternative scenarios to facilitate the broad-scale decision-making processes as the trade-off between biodiversity conservation and resource ustilisation objectives becomes ever more complex.