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Miami, Florida, USA - Oceanographer Craig Randall Smith, Ph.D., has won a prestigious Pew Marine Conservation Fellowship for his plan to design marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean and thereby help conserve the delicate and diverse ecosystems of seamounts and deep-sea plains in the face of fishing and future mining.

Smith, a professor in the Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, is one of only five 2003 recipients of Pew Marine Conservation Fellowships-the world's most esteemed awards honoring and investing in applied ocean conservation science and outreach. Each Pew Fellow receives $150,000 over three years to carry out innovative, interdisciplinary projects related to marine conservation. The Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation is a program of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, USA.

The deep seas of the Pacific harbor ecosystems of extraordinary biodiversity and fragility in the form of seamounts (underwater mountains) and the relatively flat seabottom expanses known as abyssal plains. These communities typically are easily disrupted by-and very slow to recover from-physical disturbances. Yet deep seafloor ecosystems are being increasingly impacted by human activities such as bottom fishing (trawling) and waste disposal.

Some Pacific deep-sea areas also contain deposits of manganese nodules and other metals such as nickel, copper, and cobalt. These nodules could soon become important commercial sources, as land-based sources become depleted and underwater mining technologies advance. A single mining operation could strip as much as 700 square kilometers of seafloor per year, yielding near total faunal mortality. Recovery from such disturbances would require decades for soft-sediment dwelling fauna, and perhaps a million years for life forms that are dependent on the nodule substrate.

To preserve biodiversity in these delicate and important ecosystems, Smith says, "it is imperative to create a system of marine protected areas that will be based on sound science, off limits to fishing and mining, and well integrated into the international legal framework." Smith and his colleague Anthony Koslow, a world expert in seamount diversity, will collect and integrate information about the biological characteristics and habitat distribution of western Pacific seamounts. They will collaborate with research vessels to perform fieldwork to supplement the existing data and then will perform molecular studies on the flora and fauna collected.

Smith will also research manganese nodules that lie on the ocean floor area between the Clarion and Clipperton Zone Fractures-roughly west of Baja California. Working with leading scientists, he will collect fauna from research expeditions and will integrate data from the scientific literature and the expeditions into a single taxonomic database under the leadership of the International Seabed Authority. As the project progresses, Smith and his colleagues will convene a workshop of experts to review the data and design marine protected areas for Pacific seamounts and the Clarion and Clipperton Zone nodule region.

Smith has carried out some of the most important and innovative work in deep-sea biology over the past several decades. In addition to his work on the ecosystem implications of deep-sea mining, Smith has recently performed pioneering research about the environments surrounding decaying whale skeletons on the ocean floor. He is also an expert in deep-sea sediments and the fauna of invasive Hawaiian mangroves.

Smith has been an organizer, invited speaker, and participant in scores of professional marine meetings and conferences, including the International Seabed Authority, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Universities of Oslo (Norway), Aberdeen (Scotland), and Southampton (England). He has appeared on numerous national television and radio broadcasts in the USA, Canada, Korea, and Europe, including BBC's 'Blue Planet' series The Deep in 2001-2002. In addition to having published upwards of 70 papers in professional journals such as Nature, Deep-Sea Research II, BioScience, Marine Ecology Progress Series, and Environmental Conservation, Smith's work has appeared in Science, New Scientist, National Geographic Magazine, Wildlife Conservation, and many other popular science publications.

In 1988, Smith joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii, where he has organized international projects to address the probability of species extinctions from deep-sea mining. He also has worked extensively with the International Seabed Authority to predict and manage the environmental impacts of nodule mining in the abyssal Pacific.

Smith completed his undergraduate work in biological science at Michigan State University and received his Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Subsequently he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he explored colonization processes in intertidal communities. He then spent four years at the University of Washington exploring the effects of natural disturbance, mining, and radioactive waste disposal on deep-sea communities.

Contact Information for Craig Smith:
Department of Oceanography University of Hawaii
1000 Pope Rd
Honolulu, HI 96822 USA

For background information on these issues, see: Glover, A. G. and C. R. Smith. The deep-sea floor ecosystem: Current status and prospects of anthropogenic change by the year 2025. Environmental Conservation 30: 219-241, 2003.

Information about the Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation and the Pew Institute for Ocean Science

The Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation is a program of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science in partnership with the University of Miami. The Pew Institute for Ocean Science strives to undertake, sponsor, and promote world-class scientific activity aimed at protecting the world's oceans and the species that inhabit them. The Pew Fellows Program annually awards five fellowships of $150,000 each that contribute to advancing solutions to the oceans' most pressing problems. The program seeks to foster greater public understanding of the direct and crucial relationship between life in the sea and life on land. By supporting the ingenuity and leadership of its distinguished Fellows, the program calls awareness to the critical state of our oceans and demonstrates viable solutions to someof the world's most urgent conservation challenges. For more information, visit the website of the Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation (http://www.pewmarine.org) or the Pew Institute (http://www.pewoceanscience.org).