September 21, 2007
It’s Dark Down There, Too
BY: suzannah
Saving the ocean is not easy, and there’s a big, fat, obvious reason why: The ocean is freakin’ huge! Vast stretches of it have never been studied or visited by humans. Sure, that makes the ocean a bit harder to exploit, but it also makes it harder to defend.
Enter Dr. Beth Fulton, an Australian marine ecologist. She has created a new modeling framework for ocean ecology that’s the most advanced in the world. Dubbed Atlantis, the model attempts to fully integrate the ecology of the ocean into one digestible system that can be used for fisheries management in a level of detail not possible before.
Atlantis was recently rated “the best in the world” by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, and Dr. Fulton won a big award, too.