BEST-BSIERP Scientists: I

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Jim Ianelli

NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center

jim. ianelli@noaa. gov | Dr. James Ianelli has been active in fisheries research for over 27 years. Early in his career he worked as a field biologist holding a number of unique positions. Most of this work involved investigations on tuna biology and fisheries but also included work on Dungeness crabs, flying fish, trochus, and statistical data collection problems for small-scale reef fisheries.

He served as a research scientist with the South Pacific Commission based in New Caledonia, and was Lab Director for the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission’s facility in Panama. He has conducted independent tuna tagging experiments on juvenile bluefin tuna based in small fishing villages in Japan.

Ianelli completed his BS at Humboldt State University and his earned a PhD in 1993 at University of Washington on the population dynamics of skipjack tuna. For the last 16 years, he has been an active member of Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s stock assessment team and authored numerous analytical documents applied to the management of important groundfish species in the North Pacific. His research interests include developing statistical approaches for ecosystem/fisheries conservation management. He is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington and serves as an editor for the journal “Natural Resource Modeling. ” He chairs the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Gulf of Alaska Groundfish Plan Team and serves as a member of the Advisory Panel for the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna.

Katrin Iken

University of Alaska Fairbanks

iken@uaf. ims. edu | Katrin Iken was born and raised in Germany and came to the US in 1999. She holds a position as Associate Professor in Marine Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr. Iken enjoys Alaska with its abundant nature and wildlife. She has always been fascinated with the polar regions. After spending much of her previous career working in the Antarctic, she now enjoys working in the Arctic regions. So far, she has participated in about 15 research cruises to the Antarctic, the Arctic and the Deep-Sea. Her background is in benthic ecology, especially trophic interactions and food web studies. Dr. Iken will be part of the sea ice team in the BEST program. She will be in charge for the analysis of stable isotopes to analyze the fate of sea-ice algae within the ice-associates, the pelagic and the benthic food webs.

David Irons

US Fish and Wildlife Service

david_irons@fws. gov | David Irons is the Alaska Seabird Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He also serves as Chair for the Circumpolar Seabird Group (CBird), which is a subject-expert group of the international organization, Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF). He is Chair of the Organizing Committee for the first World Seabird Conference (September 2010), and an adjunct professor with University of Alaska Anchorage.

David came to Alaska in 1976 from Penn State to work as an assistant on a sea otter project on Attu Island, where he spent many cold hours underwater in leaky dry suits counting sea urchins and other benthic invertebrates. He received his MS from Oregon State University in 1982. With his attention switching from marine mammals and the nearshore community to seabirds and the marine ecosystem, David received his PhD from UC Irvine in 1992. His work throughout Alaska has focused on seabird foraging behavior and ecology and population changes related to food availability and climate change. Recently he has been working with seabird scientists from the circumpolar Arctic to investigate the effects of climate change at the circumpolar scale. He is currently working on creating the first Global Seabird Colony Database and a Global Seabird Information Network, as well as many ongoing field studies. Results of his work are published in many peer-reviewed journal articles.