Presented by David Secor, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Meeting ID: 981 2642 4942
Passcode: 089011
Migratory shelf fishes exhibit ordered departures and arrivals to known habitats and fishing grounds across large ecosystems. An imminent change to these seasonal migrations is the imposition of offshore wind energy projects (OWFs), which will become ubiquitous in the US NW Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere. Concentrations of wind turbine foundations and platforms arrayed across continental shelves and latitudes will likely cause novel stopover behaviors and migration pathways, as previously documented for offshore petroleum platforms. Evaluation of related impacts will require development of new integrative approaches to advantage existing and future telemetry databases. Flyways describe networked migrations and destination and stop-over habitats. As such they can be measured as a series of vectors (aggregate speed across latitudes) and spatial persistence (phenology of destination and stopover habitat occurrence). Long-term telemetry datasets for striped bass, Atlantic sturgeon, and sand tiger shark support development of baseline flyway models against which future OWF-impacted flyways can be contrasted and conditioned on oceanographic covariates. From flyway models and associated databases, we are developing flyway metrics, which can provide insight on when and where offshore wind projects will affect migration pathways and stopover behaviors.
Dr. Dave Secor and his group study marine fish migration ― research questions that are responsive to fisheries stewardship, threatened species, ecosystem management, and offshore wind development. This research occurs at large regional scales and employs pioneering approaches in animal biotelemetry and hard-part chemistry. Much of their work engages commercial and recreational fishers at Ocean City, MD and within the Chesapeake Bay. In 2015, Johns Hopkins published his book Migration Ecology of Marine Fishes, the first on the topic in 50 years. The book synthesizes hundreds of digital era discoveries, positing new concepts borrowed from bird migration and ecosystem theory. The University System of Maryland conferred the Regents Award and the American Fisheries Society Oscar E. Sette Award for contributions to marine fish migration and conservation. Dr. Secor has Professor appointments at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the University of Tokyo. He received a B.A. degree from Macalester College and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1990.
View more events from our seminar series here.