Biography

Now emeritus, Dr. Lisa Levin served from 1992-2022 as Professor of Biological Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego and from 2011-2017 as Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps. Prior to working at Scripps, she was a professor for 9 years at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Dr. Levin’s research interests include biodiversity of deep-sea continental margin ecosystems including chemosynthetic habitats and oxygen minimum zones, the influence of ocean deoxygenation and ocean acidification on upwelling ecosystems, wetland structure and function in the context of invasion, restoration and water re-use, and connectivity in coastal ecosystems. Her recent work has addressed ocean ecosystem vulnerability to climate change and to human resource extraction, with a focus on the deep sea. Over the past 40 years she has led or participated in over 50 deep-sea expeditions to the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, using ships, submersibles and ROVs to sample and conduct experiments. 

Dr. Levin has published over 300 scientific papers; while most focus on macrofauna or policy she has co-authored 12 papers on metazoan meiofauna, and 10 on foraminifera.  To help advance science in service of society and to bring deep-sea science to ocean policy making Dr. Levin helped found and presently co-leads both the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative and the Deep-Ocean Observing Strategy.  She actively contributes to global assessments (IPCC reports) and the World Ocean Assessments. Dr. Levin is a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She has given the IOC-UNESCO Anton Bruun (IOC-UNESCO), Sverdrup (AGU), and Revelle (US National Academy) Medal Lectures, and was awarded the ALSO Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018 and the Prince Albert 1 Grand Medal in Science in 2019.

Topic: Why care about deep-sea meiofauna? From fundamental ecological research to monitoring human impacts for environmental management and governance

Biography

Ellen Pape studies the distribution, diversity and functioning of benthic communities, including meiobenthos, to characterize the environmental baseline in an area of interest for deep-sea polymetallic nodule mining. These data are used not only to obtain a better understanding of ecological patterns and processes in the deep sea, but also to formulate recommendations for environmental management. She uses techniques such as high-throughput sequencing, integrative taxonomy, and stable isotope analysis. Currently, she is a postdoctoral scientist at the Marine Biology Research Group of Ghent University in Belgium.