Steve Hawkins is Emeritus Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Southampton and physically based at the Marine Biological Association of the UK, Plymouth as a Lankester Research Fellow.
Steve has worked on rocky shores since 1975. He and his students have used them as tractable systems for experimental ecology and as sentinels for detecting responses of marine biodiversity to global change and its interaction with regional and local scale impacts via maintenance of long-term and repeating broadscale surveys. He has also worked on limpet fisheries, eco-engineering of sea defences, recovery and restoration of coastal ecosystems, especially in urbanised areas. He still does over 50 days of field surveys each year despite very creaky knees.
Presentation:
In the footsteps of giants: homage to the French founders of intertidal ecology
Steve Hawkins1,2, Nova Mieszkowska1,3, Louise Firth4, Ana Luisa Mano5, Fernando Lima5, Dominique Davoult6, Amelia Curd7, Stan Dubois 7
1Marine Biological Association, UK - 2University of Southampton, UK - 3University of Liverpool, UK - 4 University College Cork, Ireland - 5 CIBIO, Portugal - 6 Sorbonne Université, Station Biologique Roscoff, France - 7 IFREMER, France
It is fitting that ITRS returns this year to France, the birthplace in Europe of rocky shore ecology. The work of the early giants is revisited to remind a largely anglophone and search-engine driven audience of their lasting value. Early descriptive ecology of rocky shores started at the beginning of the 19th Century in North-west France (e.g., Audouin and Milne-Edwards). Some of the first experimental studies commenced in France in the early 20th century (Hariot), exploring the processes shaping patterns on rocky shores, with much progress up to World War II (e.g., Fischer-Piette and Hatton). Broadscale biogeographic surveys, initially linked to taxonomic collecting, commenced in the 1930s and were well underway in the 1940s and 1950s (Fischer-Piette and colleagues including Crisp). Most of this fieldwork was on the North-west and Western coasts of France with occasional trans-manche forays. Researchers took advantage of a network of marine laboratories along the Channel and Atlantic Coasts, particularly in Brittany and down to the Basque Country. Surveys extended from Calais, around France and along the Iberian Peninsula down to the then French colonies in North Africa. These surveys provide a superb baseline against which to measure responses to climate fluctuations and recent anthropogenic climate change. The role of the wider “Celtic Fringe” in following in the footsteps of work commenced in Breizh is alluded to briefly. Post-war pioneering work on reef-forming sabellarians (Gruet) and contemporary follow-up work (led by our hosts) is outlined. Attention is also drawn to some more recent research on functional ecology of rocky reefs in Brittany.
