NZMSS Conference 2010 Wellington

Marine Environments: Past, Present and Future

Photo courtesy of Kareen Schnabel

Thank you to the organisations that helped support NZMSS's 2010 Wellington Conference!

Each year the NZMSS organizes a national conference to provide a forum for all those involved in researching, managing or developing policy for aspects of the marine environment and its resources around New Zealand and in the broader SW Pacific region. Typically attendees include students, academics, CRI researchers and private consultants across a wide range of marine science disciplines including biology, ecology, population and ecosystem modeling, oceanography, chemistry and geology, as well as government departmental, regional council and NGO staff involved in marine conservation, fisheries management, coastal planning and policy setting.

This year the conference theme is “Marine Environments: Past, Present and Future”. This is timely for two reasons. It is 50 years since the Society was founded in 1960 and it will be helpful to look back at how New Zealand marine science has grown and flourished over the period and has provided increasing understanding of how our marine environments and ecosystems are shaped, function and have changed. Second our marine environments may be facing a period of great change due to increasing human pressures and impacts, including the suite of effects due to climate change. The conference provides an opportunity to jointly consider what science is required to detect these changes, what are we not monitoring now, how the threats interact with each other and the natural drivers of variation, which are the most important threats to NZ marine environments, and what should our responses be?

Our plenary speakers will be presenting papers on aspects of the conference theme at the start of each day over the three days of the conference. The contributed papers will cover a broader range of topics but as far as possible we will organize them so that those on aspects of the past will be presented on Day 1, those focused on the present will be presented on Day 2, while those that examine some aspect of future scenarios or predictions will be presented on Day 3.

Student involvement in the conference is strongly supported through the provision of 12 prizes for the best oral and poster presentations by students and through the provision of travel support for all out-of-town students presenting a paper. Additionally any surplus from the conference is used by the Society during the year to support post-graduate students travel to their first overseas conference and to support the research programme of one or two outstanding students.

Please contact conference@nzmss.org if you have any questions.

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