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Projects

School is organized into projects. For short description of each project and project leaders' bio read bellow.

• Mapping seagrass distribution – a first step toward biodiversity conservation
• Determination of the age in commercial fish catch

Mapping seagrass distribution – a first step toward biodiversity conservation

Seagrasses are specialised marine flowering plants (angiosperms) that have adapetd to the nearshore environment of most of the world's continents. They grow in sediment in the sea floor with erect, elongated leaves and a buried root-like structure (rhizomes). There are relatively few species globally (about 60) and these are grouped into just 13 Genera and 5 Families. Few hundreds marine animal and plant species live, feed, breed and hide in immense seagrass meadows. Among them there are many fishes, crabs and seashells, which have a big economical value. In addition to their large biological diversity, seagrass meadows perform many other important and irreplaceable functions in the in marine ecosystem:

• They enrich water and sediment with oxygen.
• Wave attenuation and protection of the coastal erosion thanks to their long and dense leaves
• Prevention of sediment re-suspension due to the dense complex of subterranean stalks and roots
• Improvement of water transparency by “trapping” particles from the water

Destruction and loss from many coastal environments has been reported all over the world. Therefore, it is important to map and record the distribution of not only the location of existing seagrass, but also areas of potential segrass habitat. The main goal of our survey will be to asses the Posidonia oceanica abundance and distribution in Cape Kamenjak, southern Istria. The student will document the general patterns of seagrass in the area, place cross transects by scuba diving, measure the parameters in quadrats and create a photo documentation. Quantitative and qualitative data will be log in the GIS (ArcView 9.2 ® software).

Martina Hervat holds a diploma in marine biology and ecology from Centre for marine studies, University of Split, Croatia. She is currently working in the NGO Green Istria as a manager of the educational centre in Premantura. Martina is a scuba diving instructor interested in involving amateurs in environmental data collection using nondestructive sampling methods.

Sustainable fishery started to be a matter of scientific debates already in the middle of the last century. Later on the broad community became interested in that question. We are aware of the fact that due to the extreme economic pressure on fish communities, the fishing industry catches immature fish every day. But how we do know if fish is mature or not? And after all how old is the fish that gets cough?

There are different ways of determining fish age, but maybe the most interesting one is trough scales. Scales are in many ways similar to growing rings of the trees. If we put them under the microscope we can determine how old the fish is and also many other things about the life of that individual.

According to that, it can be said that the main goal of this project is to teach students a technique of determining the age of a fish but also to point out the economic and environmental importance of the fact that the caught fish needs to be old enough before it is caught.

Lovorka graduated marine biology and ecology, University Centre for marine studies, University of Split, Split, Croatia. After that she obtained a Master degree in Environmental Science and Policy, Department of Environmental Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Her personal interests are policy of management of fishery resources, and sustainable development and management of sea.