EG-BAMM’s Health Working Group has a new publication
The Health Working Group, an initiative led by Dr Andres Barbosa within the Expert group on Birds and Marine Mammals has published an Information summary about Antarctic Wildlife Diseases on the Antarctic Environments portal. You can read it at https://www.environments.aq/
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On the importance of being a Life Science National Representative
We are currently updating the list of national representatives for SCAR Life Science. Please check the Membership table and let us know if there are any changes that may have been missed. As you can see some countries have not updated their list for a while. So please contact us rapidly if needed. Thanks.
In addition, if national representatives already know about their participation to the Life Science meeting in Kuala Lumpur, 2016, please let us know about it. It is important for the Life Science quorum that we get as many nations involved as possible. A quick reminder: each nation can send between 1 and several representatives to the meeting, but only one vote per nation will be counted. We want to make sure there will be at least one representative from each member nation be present in Kuala Lumpur, so please make sure you liaise with other representatives ahead of the meeting and inform us as soon as possible of who will be present.
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Important notice regarding the format of the Life Science meeting in Kuala Lumpur
There will be a different format for the Science Group business meetings in Kuala Lumpur, 2016. The Science Group meetings will be on Wednesday 24 August in the middle of the Open Science Conference, and for Life Sciences we will also meet on the following Saturday 27 August. The planned schedule for Wednesday is currently:
0900 – 1300 Plenary
1300 – 1400 Lunch and Posters
– It has been proposed that the various SCAR groups produce a poster on their activities and will be featured during the lunch as well as at other events.
1400 – 1800 Separate SSG meetings
The Plenary session will be open to all interested scientists. The exact arrangements and content for Plenary sessions are to be developed by the Science Group Chief Officers David Bromwich (Physical Sciences), Berry Lyons (Geosciences) and Graham Hosie (Life Sciences). The separate Science Group business meetings would be a meeting limited to national representatives from each SCAR nation and representatives of the various Action and Expert Groups. Observers are welcome to attend the Life Sciences meeting except when voting is required. We will also be meeting on the following Saturday to ensure that the Life Sciences Group can complete its business prior to reporting to the Delegates.
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Retrospective Analysis of the Antarctic Tracking Data (RAATD)
The RAATD project has taken a big step forward. A team of data crunchers and modellers met at a joint EG-BAMM and EG-ABI meeting in Brussels to compile and standardise the datasets on the one hand, and to start processing them and choose modelling options on the other. The meeting was hosted by the Belgian Science Policy Office in Brussels and was extremely successful: the project now has more than two million lines of data points from above 2000 individuals from 14 species of top predators covering almost all the Southern Ocean (see map attached). The detailed report can be found on the EG-BAMM and EG-ABI webpages.
For those who have not yet shared their data with this project, it’s not too late! Contact Mark and Yan if you’re keen to have your dataset (Argos, GPS, GLS) added to this already impressive collection and help us determine the Ecologically Significant Areas of the Southern Ocean! The final products will be varied (including contributing to the dynamic Atlas) but we’re initially aiming at a synthesis paper in a high profile journal.