Freshwater Conservation Seminars

Join us for a day meeting to discuss conservation of forgotten freshwater fishes around the world.

Learn from the challenges and success of a variety of speakers from academia, museums and NGOs and find opportunities for collaboration.

Agenda

Venue: School of Geography Seminar Room 1

1000: Welcome & Coffee and introduction from convenor: Dr Josie South, School of Biology.

1030: Saving the world’s Forgotten Fishes: Stories from Shoal’s 1,000 Fishes Initiative. Mike Baltzer & Georgie Bull, Shoal.

1100: From Southern African Barbs to Lake Tanganyika Cichlids: A Conservation Journey in African Freshwater Fishes. Dr Manda Kambikambi, Schlumberger Fellow, University of Leeds & University of Zambia.

1130: Fish, Fishers and Finances: Working with Brazilian Traditional Communities to Improve the Ornamental Fish Trade.  Prof Sean Killen, University of Glasgow.

Lunch 12.00-12.45

Venue: Roger Stevens LT19

1300-1400: Streaming Services; New methods to monitor tropical riparian biodiversity. Christian Ching, Natural History Museum.

Let us know you are coming along:

Speaker profiles

Mike Baltzer – Executive Director, Shoal.
Mike is a conservation biologist with over 30 years of experience in Asia, Africa and Europe. He started his career undertaking and leading biological inventory expeditions in Uganda, Vietnam and Indonesia. He since specialised in leading large, complex, multi-country focused conservation programmes. For more than 18 years, he worked for WWF as the Conservation Director for their Greater Mekong Programme, Director of the Danube Carpathian Programme and was for nine years the Lead for their global tiger programme, Tigers Alive. Mike left WWF in 2018 to launch a new partnership he conceived and founded focused on freshwater fish, SHOAL.

Georgie Bull – Programme, Officer Shoal
Georgie graduated in Marine Biology & Coastal Ecology, and has worked as a seagrass project assistant, and researcher for the BBC Natural History Unit, where she worked closely with remote fishing communities in Asia. She is a freelance underwater photographer, filmmaker, and science

Dr Manda Kambikambi – Schlumberger Fellow, University of Leeds & University of Zambia
Manda Kambikambi is an ichthyologist from the University of Zambia, now starting a postdoc at Leeds. Her research spans taxonomy, stable isotope ecology, and assessing human impacts on endemic fishes, from South African minnows to the unique cichlids of Lake Tanganyika.

Christian Ching, Natural History Museum, London
Christian is a PhD student at the Natural History Museum and University of Southampton. His research aims to develop the use of passive monitoring tools through ecoacoustics and environmental DNA methods. Based in the Central Cardamoms Mountains of Cambodia, we conducted surveys over a two-year period with local collaborators, deploying acoustic recorders, aquatic eDNA capture, and sampling herpetological and fish communities. Our initial results describe how riparian monitoring can contribute towards an integrated approach towards ecosystem conservation, taxonomy,
ecology, and livelihood development.

Prof Sean Killen, University of Glasgow
Professor of ecophysiology whose research explores how environmental change affects animal physiology, behaviour, and social dynamics, with a particular focus on fish. His work combines experiments, fieldwork, and modeling to understand how stressors such as temperature, oxygen limitation, and human exploitation influence performance, welfare, and ecological outcomes.