By Staff Reports
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
1:00-2:00 p.m.
Hale ‘Imiloa 111
Windward Community College
(KANEOHE)-– Robert ‘Bob’ Richmond, PhD will talk about reef degradation and emerging technologies in the WCC Community Forum in Chemistry on Wednesday, February 6 from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. in Hale ‘Imiloa 111. The forum is free and open to the public.
Coral reefs throughout the world are being degraded, resulting in ecological, economic and cultural losses. The problem with most coral reef assessment and monitoring efforts has been the inability to determine exact causes of coral reef losses at sub-lethal levels, when management intervention can yield positive results. Emerging technologies blended with traditional ecological knowledge can help us understand reef stress from a coral’s perspective. By “listening” to corals and coral reefs, we can better guide activities to manage the human behaviors responsible for coral reef losses.
Bob Richmond is a Research Professor and Director of the University of Hawaii’s Kewalo Marine Laboratory. He received a B.S. in Biology/Geology with High Distinction from the University of Rochester in 1976, an M.S. in Marine Environmental Sciences from the Marine
Sciences Research Center, SUNY at Stony Brook, in 1982, a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the Dept. of Ecology and Evolution, SUNY at Stony Brook, in 1983, and a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Since then, he has spent most of his professional career studying coral reef ecosystems in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, including the Virgin Islands, the Grenadines, the Galapagos Islands, Hawaii, Japan and throughout Micronesia. He is the President of the International Society for Reef Studies, the Science Advisor to the All-Islands Committee of the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force and a science advisor for the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, and is a member of the Science and Policy Advisory Committee for the Palau International Coral Reef Center. He received an award for “Outstanding Scientific Advancement of Knowledge” from the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force in 2003, an Aldo Leopold Fellowship in Environmental Leadership in 2004, and a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation in 2006. He works closely with community-based organizations, elected and traditional leaders, and stakeholders, and has trained over 50 Pacific Islanders in his laboratory over the years. Bob has been the P.I. or Co-P.I. on over
$16 million in research grants from NSF, NIH and NOAA. His research interests include coral reef ecology, marine conservation biology, ecotoxicology, bridging science to management and policy, and the integration of traditional ecological knowledge with modern approaches
to resource use and protection.
The Community Forum in Chemistry is co-sponsored by Windward Community College and the American Chemical Society-Hawaii Section. For more information, call Letty Colmenares, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Chemistry at 236-9120.