Dr Daniel Pauly is the Sea Around Us Principal Investigator and Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. A French and Canadian citizen, Daniel completed his studies in Germany. His doctorate (1979) and habilitation (1985) are in Fisheries Biology, from the University of Kiel. He has travelled extensively and experienced a multitude of countries, cultures, and modes of exploiting aquatic ecosystems in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. This perspective allowed him to develop tools for managing data-sparse fisheries.
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Daniel Pauly worked at the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM), in Manila, Philippines. In 1994, he became a Professor at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, of which he was the Director for five years (Nov. ’03-Oct. ’08). Since 1999, he is also Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us initiative (see www.seaaroundus.org), funded for 15 years by the Pew Charitable Trusts and devoted to studying, documenting and promoting policies to mitigate the impact of fisheries on the world’s marine ecosystems (see AMBIO, 34: 290-295, 2007).
The concepts, methods, and software that Daniel Pauly co-developed, documented in over 1000 scientific and general-interest publications, are used throughout the world, not least as a result of his teaching a multitude of courses, and supervising students in four languages on five continents. This applies especially to the Ecopath modelling approach and software (www.ecopath.org) and FishBase, the online encyclopaedia of more than 35,000 fish species (www.fishbase.org), the latter recently complemented by SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org).
Two books, reflecting his current interests were published in 2010: Five Easy Pieces: Reporting on the Global Impact of Fisheries and Gasping Fish and Panting Squids: Oxygen, Temperature, and the Growth of Water-Breathing Animals. In January 2016, with Dirk Zeller, he published an article titled “Catch reconstruction reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining”, a summary of what later appeared in the Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries, concluding a decade-long activity of the Sea Around Us.
Daniel Pauly’s body of work has been recognised in various profiles, notably in Science (Apr. ’02); Nature (Jan. ’03); The New York Times (Jan. ’03), in developing countries, and by numerous awards, among them honorary doctorates from four universities, being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Science; ‘03) and awarded the Sir John William Dawson Medal (‘17); receiving the Award of Excellence of the American Fisheries Society (‘04); the International Cosmos Prize, Japan (‘05), the Volvo Environmental Prize, Sweden (‘06), the Excellence in Ecology Prize, Germany (‘07), the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology, Spain (‘08), an Ocean Award in the Science category (‘16); the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology, Spain (‘19), the Beverton Medal by the Fisheries Society of the British Isles (‘21), the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (’23) and being named one of France’s Chevaliers de la Légion d’Honneur (‘17).