Greetings! For those interested in bycatch, there are a series of workshops at the Halifax Biennial: On Saturday the 28th, from 0800-1700, there is an all day workshop: Marine mammal mortality in global fisheries: Assessment, mitigation, and capacity building On Sunday the 29th, from 0800-1200, a morning workshop: Development and implementation of low-cost methods to reduce cetacean bycatch in small scale gillnet fisheries On Sunday afternoon, from 1300-1700 is another workshop: Getting to the bottom of bycatch: a toolbox for place-based risk assessment of marine mammal bycatch I've pasted the abstract for this workshop below. We'd love to have a good showing of scientists from around the world! Please take this workshop into consideration when making travel plans. Let me know any questions! Thanks so much, Ellen Marine mammal bycatch, a major threat, poses particular challenges in developing countries. Data to document bycatch and the effects of bycatch are often lacking as research takes limited time, money, and training. We have designed a suite of spatial tools that enable scientists to conduct place-based bycatch risk assessments that can be used in sites with varying gaps in data. The tools are hosted on a website and have open-source processing. We will demonstrate and train delegates to use the toolbox with existing data from our fieldsites in Southeast Asia. We will also ask delegates to come with a summary of their current abundance, distribution and fisheries data. Then in mixed groups, we will determine data gaps, needs, and commonalities, such as needs for training, outside consultants, regional workshops, funding or technology. We will also evaluate each site using interdisciplinary methods as found in Teh et al (2015) to determine how socio-cultural and economic dynamics contribute to bycatch. Our output will be a joint article that will summarize our discussions as a first global view of how these methods will support practitioners to estimate marine mammal population abundance, bycatch, fisheries and find effective measures to reduce bycatch to sustainable levels. Teh, SLL, Teh, CLL, Hines, E., Junchumpoo, C., and R. Lewison. 2015. Contextualizing the coupled socio-ecological conditions of marine megafauna bycatch. Ocean and Coastal Management 116: 449-465. Ellen Hines, PhD Associate Director and Professor of Geography & Environment Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies San Francisco State University 3150 Paradise Dr. Tiburon, CA 94920 415 338 3512, ehines@sfsu.edu<mailto:ehines@sfsu.edu> http://rtc.sfsu.edu/research/in_hines.html