Given the current uncertainties and worldwide travel disruption caused by the pandemic, INCISE2021 will be an online conference. To avoid online fatigue and to give everybody around the world the chance to follow at least part of the conference during reasonable daylight hours, we plan to split the conference into manageable blocks, with two sessions of 2.5 hours per day. We will keep your time zone and biorhythm in mind when creating the conference programme and assigning presentation times. Despite INCISE2021 being an online meeting, it has been planned to allow incorporation of elements of in-person meeting .

The conference format will consist of two 2.5-hour sessions per day over the course of the week. Each session will consist of oral presentations (12 minutes with 3 minutes for questions) and a poster session. To ensure maximum visibility of posters, submitted posters will be available to download a week prior to the meeting, and participants will have 3 minutes to give a summary of their posters. During the conference there will be a dedicated breakout room running to facilitate open discussion between participants.

INCISE has had working groups since 2012 and they have produced many outputs (see INCISE website for more details). During the conference there will be two dedicated working group sessions i.e. an AM and PM slots.

Full registration: £60

Student registration: £30

Registration fee includes access to the 5 day conference, which includes 8 sessions of talks and posters.

INCISE Working Groups:

• WG1: Litter in canyons (Peter Harris)
• WG2: Conservation & outreach (Jaime Davies & Nathalie Valette-Silver)
• WG3: Submarine landslides & geohazards in submarine canyons (Joshu Mountjoy)
• WG4: How to study submarine canyons (Pere Puig & Veerle Huvenne)

Astounded by the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA? Now imagine canyons in the deep sea! Submarine canyons are important geological features of the sea and they act as a link between shallow water environments with the deep sea. We are exploiting the marine environment for many resources such as oil, gas and fisheries to name but a few. Canyons serve as important structures within the marine environment and act as nursery habitats and due to complex currents serve as ‘hotspots’ for biodiversity and feeding grounds for larger animals such as tuna and cetaceans.

In a world’s first, the INCISE society is hosting a global free public engagement event where you can hear from world’s experts on submarine canyons.

Date:

Wednesday 16th June

Time:

13:00 – 14:00 (CEST)

Peter Harris is a marine geoscientist with 30+ years experience working in marine science and management. Since 2014 Peter has been the Managing Director of UNEP/GRID-Arendal, a foundation based in Norway established to assist developing countries with solving their environmental problems. He has been the leader/co-leader of over 30 research voyages and conducted research on the Great Barrier Reef, the Fly River Delta in Papua New Guinea and on the geological record of Antarctic bottom water formation and ice sheet advance/retreat.

Peter has a keen interest in submarine canyons and is a regular attendee of the INCISE meetings. He co-authored the first global synthesis of submarine canyons in 2011 and the first digital global seafloor geomorphic features map (GIS database) of the oceans in 2014. Since 2014 Peter has been the Managing Director of UNEP/GRID-Arendal, a foundation based in Norway established to assist developing countries with solving their environmental problems.

Veerle A.I. Huvenne is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK, where she coordinates the Seafloor and Habitat Mapping Team. She is Principal Investigator on the ERC Starting Grant CODEMAP and has >15 years of experience in habitat mapping and sediment dynamics, mainly focussing on complex deep-sea environments such as submarine canyons, cold-water coral settings, hydrothermal vents and seamounts. She has extensive expertise working with new technologies and marine robotic systems such as AUVs and ROVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and Remotely Operated Vehicles) and often works closely with the engineering teams on the development of new sensor or vehicle capabilities.

Dr Jaime Davies is an associate research fellow at the University of Plymouth with over 10 years’ experience as a deep-sea benthic ecologist, acting as lead biologist on several research cruises. Working in the field of conservation, with an interest in the ecology and mapping of vulnerable species/habitats, providing data to government agencies to use for proposing/designating Marine Protected Areas in UK and French waters. With an interest in cold-water corals, Jaime works closely with coral taxonomists and has organised many international cold-water coral identification training workshops. She is a co-founder of the INCISE network, a working group leader of the INCISE conservation working group and editor of a special issue on submarine canyons.

Ivan recently graduated from the University of Gibraltar having completed an MSc Marine Science and Climate Change .

For his dissertation he worked with Drs Jaime Davies, Veele Huvenne and Awantha Dissanayake on assessing marine litter in submarine canyons. From his body of work he will publish several scientific papers.

Ivan recently delivered a workshop on identifying and enumerating marine litter in the deep sea to the current cohort of international MSc Marine Science students.

Marine litter is now a well-documented threat to marine ecosystems and has been found even in the deepest habitats. Submarine canyons act as conduits transporting sediment and nutrients from shallow water to the deep. As this transport system is not discriminative of what it transports, litter is also increasingly being funnelled through canyons. Many canyons are close to the continental shelf, and thus maybe subject to higher densities of domestic litter. To further our understanding of the impact of litter on canyons and wider deep-sea habitats, we first need to a greater understanding of the source of litter in canyons, but also how litter is being transported within them and ultimately how much litter remains in the canyon system. This interactive workshop aims to shed light on this topic and stimulate future research.

Submarine canyons are important topographical features which are vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts. To date, concerns have focused on impacts from fisheries, but it is now becoming apparent, that marine litter is also a great threat to canyon ecosystems.

The online workshop, which will be spread across two days, will cover many aspects of litter in submarine canyons, including relevance for both macro- and micro-litter. The workshop will cover:

• Types of litter found in canyons (macro and micro) and their distribution
• Sources of litter
• Identification and sampling methods
• Source to sink transport mechanisms, including highlights from observed seafloor and sediment distributions, physical and numerical modelling studies

In particular, the workshop will highlight the current state of the art (i.e. what we currently know) and will highlight knowledge and data gaps to stimulate discussions on how the INCISE community can assist in filling them.

The workshop will be hosted on Zoom and will include a series of expert talks, illustrated with findings from recent studies in canyons and other relevant deep-sea systems, to address important questions over litter source and transport mechanism in submarine canyons. Each of the thematic sessions will be followed by interactive break-out sub-group discussions to share ideas and experiences from attendees and develop future ideas for research projects and collaboration.

Dates and Times:

9th June 12:00 – 14:30 (CEST)
10th June 20:00 – 22:30 (CEST)

Price:

£25.00

Registration:

To register email Awantha.Dissanayake@unigib.edu.gi

Limited to 40 participants.