Dr. Fernanda Valdovinos Presents on Marine Food Web Sustainability at NITheCS Colloquium
- fevaldovinos
- 1 day ago
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On December 8, 2025, Dr. Fernanda Valdovinos (UC Davis) delivered a featured colloquium address at the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, titled, "Modelling marine food webs to study their sustainability in a changing world."
As a theoretical ecologist and network scientist, Dr. Valdovinos presented an integrated network approach to evaluating how marine ecosystems respond to both environmental shifts and anthropogenic pressures. Her talk highlighted four interconnected projects that collectively expand our capacity to model and manage marine environments:
Ecological and Human Linkages: Investigating how alterations in coastal productivity and artisanal fisheries along the Chilean coast impact broader food web dynamics.
Bioeconomic Frameworks: Incorporating economic dynamics into food web models to assess fishery sustainability under combined ecological and economic pressures.
Environmental Variability: Evaluating how fluctuations in phytoplankton subsidies drive cascading bottom-up effects and influence species extinction risks.
Primary Productivity Baselines: Addressing critical modeling gaps by resolving patterns of primary productivity to better understand energy flow and community composition.
By synthesizing these diverse mechanisms into mathematical models, Dr. Valdovinos demonstrated the growing power of network ecology. Her framework provides essential, predictive insights for the sustainable management of marine ecosystems in an era of unprecedented global change.
The flyer for this event was:
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