SUMMER EU H2020: Sustainable Management of Mesopelagic Resources

Summer school, 22nd to 26th of May 2023, Reykjavík, Iceland

SUMMER EU H2020 project started in 2019 with the objective to establish a protocol to accurately estimate mesopelagic fish biomass, quantify the ecosystem services provided by the mesopelagic community (food for aquaculture, for humans, for other wild fish, climate regulation and potential for bioactive compounds) and develop a decision support tool to quantitatively balance the trade-offs between the different services for any given exploitation scenario.

One of the goals of SUMMER is to ensure “knowledge transfer” by organizing schools targeting a large audience of students.

Such a course was organized last week in Iceland. A summer school of the project was held in Reykjavík and was organized by the University of Iceland (Háskóli Island, HÍ) in collaboration with the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute of Iceland (MFRI), and several partners from the project. Dr Haseeb S. Randhawa was the leading scientist for the school. 

The school hosted 27 students from different backgrounds and countries, including 1 from Belgium, 1 from France, 1 from Germany, 4 from Norway, 4 from Portugal, 1 from the UK, 1 from the USA, and 14 from Iceland. It was organized with lectures and discussions in the morning, covering basic biology, ecology, acoustics, fisheries, economy and governance. It was complemented by laboratory work including dissection of bycaught harbour porpoise (potential predator of mesopelagic) and of mesopelagic fish (lancet fish, lantern fish and barracudinas).

The organizers would like to thank all the contributors to the school:

• Christophe Pampoulie (MFRI) for his presentation on SUMMER EU H2020 project and introduction to the mesopelagic world.
• Ingunn M Holmen and Eduardo Grimaldo (SINTEF) for their presentation on “SFI harvest & Safety and Sustainability in fisheries”. 
• Christian Lindmann (University of Bergen) for his presentation on “Effects of DVM on carbon flux and Modelling approaches for mesopelagic fish and DVM”.
• Anders Lanzen (AZTI) for his presentation on “The importance of microbial communities and how to reveal them through eDNA”.
• Raúl Prellezo (AZTI), the coordinator of the project, for his presentation on socio-economic model
  for mesopelagic fish.
• Rachel Tiller (SINTEF) for her talk on “Global biodiversity framework and mesopelagic fisheries”.
• Astrid Wittmann (University of Bremen) for her talk on Open science/open data and the management of research data, as well as for the interactive data laboratory session.
• Additional thanks are addressed to Sverrir Daníel Halldórsson, Valérie Chosson, and Svandís Eva Aradóttir from MFRI for the dissection courses on marine mammals and mesopelagic fish.

SUMMER school came to an end on Friday 26th of May 2023. 

Here is their Newsletter.