Maintaining native levels of shallow-water holothurian biodiversity in the western Indian Ocean (poster)

In East Africa, holothurian populations are currently reaching depletion due to extensive harvesting for the bêche-de-mer industry in the Far East. However, to date, conservation and management of this fauna in an ecosystem approach is currently hardly feasible, for the simple reason that we still fail to name the different players in the game, let alone to monitor the interactions between these or yet other players in the ecosystem.We strongly believe that taxonomic accuracy sets the key to understanding both history and future of holothurian biodiversity, and that only such an approach will result in unambiguous hypotheses of species richness in the different parts of the western Indian Ocean. Our attempts reveal that several flaws in the taxonomy persistently obstructed a clear understanding of holothurian biodiversity. The present study compares the poorly investigated East African situation to the better studied South East African one and stresses that an ecosystem approach is difficult to attain before the taxonomy has reached sufficient stability

Taxonomic editors plan a World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)

An authoritative register of all marine species is urgently required to facilitate biological data exchange and management, integration of biological with other ocean data, and to allow taxonomists to focus on describing new species instead of overlooking recently described species and correcting past nomenclatural confusion (Costello et al., 2006). Its production has added benefits in fostering collaboration between experts at a global scale. Easy access to encourages submissions of overlooked species to the list. In turn, this stimulates biogeographic and evolutionary research

Promoting international collaboration on ocean acidification data management. Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre Workshop; Monaco, 23-24 April 2014

Ocean acidification, often referred to as “the other carbon dioxide problem,” is the progressive increase in ocean acidity that has taken place since the onset of the industrial revolution. Biological and ecological studies of ocean acidification impacts only began in the late 1990s, but the field has evolved rapidly, with exponential growth in the past decade. For example, 374 papers on this subject were published in 2013, compared with only 18 in 2004 (see http://tinyurl.com/oaicc-biblio)