In early December, MEOPAR joined the ArcticNet Annual Scientific Meeting 2022 in Toronto, ON. MEOPAR’s Co-Scientific Director Dr. Brent Else and Research Assistant Jia Yi Fan attended conference events, along with other MEOPAR network members. Several events demonstrated the synergy between the two organizations, who, in 2022, signed an MOU for future work together, promoting northern research and culture.
True to MEOPAR’s commitment to support Early Career Ocean Professionals (ECOPs), it sponsored and helped facilitate ECOP Canada’s workshop on “Networking and Brainstorming: ECRs and the UN Ocean Decade.” The talk exposed the most common barriers ECOPs face in advancing Decade objectives: lack of funding, network, and career and training opportunities. MEOPAR is working towards lowering these same barriers, and Fan contributed to the workshop.
At the conference, MEOPAR network member presence was perceptible in the posters displayed (more than eight feature researched supported by MEOPAR or mentioning network members), its funded initiatives, its partners, and many researchers in attendance from MEOPAR member institutions.
SIKU: The Indigenous Knowledge Social Network led a workshop on how their crowdsourced resource goes beyond self-determination. It has incredible value for risk communication (e.g., ice conditions) and monitoring changes (e.g., animal diet from catches). As well, researchers can use it for project management and to train local citizen scientists, contributing much-needed capacity development and connection for research projects led by southerners. SIKU received support from MEOPAR’s Knowledge Mobilization Fund in 2022.
A recurrent feeling at the conference was that everything is connected as the ocean and Arctic research communities overlapped at the conference.
post written by Jia Yi Fan.
