Teaching and Research Planning for our shark conservation project at IPB University, Bogor, Indonesia
Written by Dr Hollie Booth Research Fellow at Bangor University
This week I visited IPB University in Bogor, Indonesia, for four days of teaching, training and research planning with colleagues at the Center for Coastal and Marine Resources Studies (PKSPL). The visit was a chance to strengthen our partnership with IPB – one of Indonesia’s top universities for marine and fisheries science – and to invest in the next generation of conservation researchers working on shark and ray conservation in Indonesia.
Guest lectures for PhD and Masters students
During the visit I delivered a series of guest lectures to PhD and Masters students in PKSPL’s Socio-Economic of the Sea Laboratory (SESO Lab), led by Prof Luky Adrianto. The classes covered four topics that sit at the heart of our research programme: shark–human interactions, which explores the complex and often conflicting ways that people relate to sharks and rays, from tourism value to consumptive value to fear; behaviour change for conservation, looking at how insights from behavioural sciences can be applied to design more effective interventions; how much is a shark worth, examining the different ways we can value sharks and what this means for conservation decision-making; and research-to-impact, focused on how to design and rigorously evaluate conservation programs in the kind of complex socio-ecological systems we work in across Indonesia.
These topics reflect the interdisciplinary approach that underpins our work: understanding not just the ecology of threatened species, but the human dimensions – the livelihoods, incentives, norms and institutions – that ultimately determine whether conservation programs and policies succeed or fail.
The discussions were brilliant. I was impressed how all the students embraced interdisciplinarity, reflected on the risk of complex feedback and unintended consequence in coupled human-natural systems, and the understood the importance of designing management interventions that are suited to the context in which they are implement rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.
Planning Egin’s PhD research on mobula ray trade
A key focus of the visit was working with our new PhD student, Muhammad Salim (aka Egin) to plan out his doctoral research. Egin’s PhD will tackle one of the most pressing questions in elasmobranch conservation right now: understanding the trade of threatened and CITES-listed species, with a particular focus on mobula rays (aka devil rays).
Mobula rays are increasingly in the spotlight internationally. At the most recent Conference of the Parties for CITES (the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species), proposals were approved to transfer all mobula rays to Appendix I – which means a complete ban on international commercial trade. Understanding how these regulatory changes might play out in practice, and how best to intervene to deliver positive outcomes for both mobula populations and the fishing communities that catch them, is critical (for more background on why this is important, you can read my paper and article on ‘Making CITES Count for sharks and rays’, recently published in Nature Ecology and Evolution).
Egin’s research will examine mobula trade at multiple scales: mapping national-level trade patterns across Indonesia and conducting site-specific deep dives to test hypotheses about the local drivers of mobula fishing, including supply-and-demand dynamics, fisher decision-making and market structures. Together, these analyses will help to understand how existing CITES implementation efforts are affecting fishing and trade flows, predict how new CITES measures might play out, and identify where and how domestic and local management interventions can be designed to reduce fishing mortality while supporting coastal livelihoods. The research will generate evidence that feeds directly into domestic and international policy processes, including helping the Indonesian government to meet their global policy commitments under CITES.
Building long-term research partnerships
Visits like this one are essential to how we work. Our projects are built on close, long-term partnerships with Indonesian researchers and institutions, and face-to-face time is invaluable for building trust, aligning research priorities, and making sure our work is grounded in local knowledge and context. IPB University and PKSPL are key partners in our wider program of work on shark and ray conservation in Indonesia, and Egin’s PhD – co-supervised between IPB and Bangor – is a direct investment in building research capacity in this field. Stay tuned for more updates!
This work is supported by grants from the Shark Conservation Fund and the International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) via Bangor University.