Student
Divya Varkey
Name: Divya Varkey
Email: d.varkey@fisheries.ubc.ca
Program: RMES, PhD
Thesis: Ecosystem Modelling of Coral Reefs in Raja Ampat
Supervisor: Tony Pitcher
Degree Held: MFSc (Central Institute of Fisheries Education, Mumbai, India); BFSc (Kerala Agricultural University, India)
Biography
Link to Research Group page
Divya joined Fisheries Centre, UBC as a PhD student in Sep, 2005, after completing a Master's degree at the Central Institute of Fisheries Education, Mumbai,India. She is building an EwE model for management of coral reef fisheriesin Raja Ampat. The core areas of her work are coral reef ecology and MPA design.Her work is funded through a Packard sponsored EBM project in west Papua, Indonesia.
Divya graduated from Kerala Agricultural University, Kerala, India with a degree of Bachelor of Fisheries Science (B.F.Sc) in 2002.
Listed below are my most significant contributions to research:
- The most important contribution is the Ecopathwith Ecosim model for coral reefs in Raja Ampat. The model will be used to identify critical ecological interactions and design management optionsfor Raja Ampat.
- The second most important contribution is my master's work on forecasting marine fish landings. The amount and type(time series and age/length classes) of information required to build a detailed population model is immense and is not available for a large number of species that form an important part of the multispecies catch in India.Hence, it was a need to explore alternative ways of predicting future catches.In my research, univariate analysis was done on time series data. It opens out future venues for analysis of multivariate (using environmental variables,or information about tandem fishery of oil sardine and mackerel) and seasonald ata for the analysis. My success is in highlighting which time series forecastingmethods are most suitable for fisheries data analysis.
- The third is a library of software codeI wrote in R - this includes software for building diet diagrams, extracting primary production from global primary production data, calculating IUU from influence table and anchor points, calculating area of the surface of Earth at any given resolution.
