Our team recently migrated all the way up to Svalbard to host a very succesfull telemetry workshop! We invited participants from several institutes, such as Ocean Tracking Network, IMR, NiNa, SioS, SSG and European Tracking Network, over the course of three full days in Longyearbyen. This workshop was funded by Svalbard Strategic Grant, a funding program pushing for collaboration, data sharing and coordination between researchers with interest in the arctic environment of Svalbard.
We are continuosly experiecing climate change and its major effects around the world, and itshappening twice as fast in the arctic environments. Svalbard is an highly exposed island for these changing environments, and scientific terms such as borealization and atlantification explains the processes we are seeing; warmer and saltier Atlantic water penetrating into the colder north, transporting marine species with origin in the Atlantic regions to northern fjords, coastal and marine systems.
We are interested in setting up telemetry studies to track different fish species, such as polar cod and Atlantic cod, as they migrate and inhabit arctic enviroments to monitor the effect of the fast changing environment in Svalbard. This workshop was used as a stepping stone into future research in the arctics, in which we spent valuable time making new connections, discussing various approaches to setting up receiver array's in the arctic system, scout for funding opportunites and scientific calls for future proposals. In collaboration with local institutes and platforms, we have already started the process of applying for long-term telemetry projects in Svalbard!
