Next week researchers and practitioners will gather together in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for the 10th Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA) Symposium. SPACES team members will be in attendance to share their research, insights, and lessons learned.

Tim Daw will be one of two speakers opening the day on Wednesday, November 1st. His keynote presentation on ecosystem services will explore the potential these services have for supporting wellbeing of people in the Western Indian Ocean. A number of other SPACES team members will also be presenting their research. Andrew Wamukota will give a presentation on Monday about the Structure-Conduct-Performance of near shore marine fisheries in Kenya. On Wedenesday, Dominique Goncalves will take us to Northern Mozambique to present about the disaggregated nature of ecosystem service wellbeing relationship.  Marlino Mubai and Julio Machele will present a poster on the contribution of coastal ecosystems in wellbeing in the Cabo Delgado province in Mozambique. A number of other SPACES team members will also be in attendance and presenting research from other projects. The entire program can be viewed here.

On Thursday November 2nd, ESPA and SPACES will host the special session, Managing coastal & marine ecosystem services to support the wellbeing of the poor. The SPACES portion of the session will focus around three broads themes, (1) poverty, wellbeing, and ecosystem service benefits are multidimensional and experienced beyond income, (2) ecosystem services are unequally distributed across social groups, and (3) lessons from the ‘co-production’ of knowledge on ecosystem services and poverty.

For the last part of the session, we will launch the SPACES Data Explorer. This is an exciting project that we received funding for in May from ESPA and that we have been working on this fall to launch in time for the symposium. Following a short presentation about the tool, the participants of the session will have the opportunity to try the Data Explorer.

We hope to see many of you at the symposium and the session, Managing coastal & marine ecosystem services to support the wellbeing of the poor!

Read more about the session here and here!