Dr Vincent will tell a story about using imperfect knowledge to help improve the status of marine life. Her tale starts with trying to understand sex roles in seahorses. It then leads to the creation of 35 marine protected areas and the first global export regulations for marine fishes. And now the Project Seahorse team is trying to end bottom trawling, a very common and devastating form of fishing. They dance on the interface between knowledge creation and knowledge application, taking the view that “we know enough”, and quickly deploying whatever they learn to effect measurable change.
Amanda Vincent is a Professor in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is also Director of Project Seahorse, a team that works globally to advance marine conservation, and she leads IUCN and CITES work on marine species. Amanda won the 2021 Indianapolis Prize, the world’s top award for animal conservation, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is proud of being the first winner of the Whitley Award. Amanda earned her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was a Research Fellow at Somerville College and the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford before becoming a faculty member at McGill University, Canada. She yearns to spend more time in the ocean.