November 2, 2016 — The following was released by the International Pectinid Workshop:

Registration for the 2017 International Pectinid Workshop is now open.

Please visit the webpage for more information: www.ipw2017.com

The 2017 International Pectinid Workshop will be convened in Portland Maine, April 19 – 25, 2017. Dr. Stokesbury is serving as co-chair with Drs. Sandra Shumway and Jay Parsons. The International Pectinid Workshop (IPW) is the premier scientific meeting for academic, government, and industry scientists carrying out research on scallops, and over its 40 year existence has increasingly attracted delegates and sponsorship from the commercial fishing and aquaculture industries.

Scallop fisheries, around the world, face similar challenges; meetings such as the IPW facilitate the communication of research on an international scale.  For example, stock-recruitment relationships are often poorly defined, but work in the English Channel, the Irish Sea, Georges Bank, the Gulf of Maine, and Iceland, are all leading to new understandings of stock connectivity. Marine Protected Areas are increasingly being employed as a management strategy to preserve stock spawning biomass and benthic community habitat, but the areas, and length of closures vary greatly depending on life history of the animal, purpose (increased production, sustainability, habitat conservation) and understanding of connectivity between aggregations. Disease, predation, bycatch, natural mortality, fisheries dependent and independent data sets, and stock assessment models are all measured and employed but vary a great deal between world fisheries, yet all these measures could be improved upon. Finally how to fund these research objectives is a key question.

We hope that many of you can join us in Portland for this important meeting.

For more information please visit the International Pectinid Workshop