December 2025 – PhD day
A new edition of iMARES PhD day with many interesting talks about PhD student projects and discussions. And it followed with a nice holidays lunch.
October 2025 – A new edition of the Ecopath with Ecosim course at ICM-CSIC
Once more, we organized an Ecopath with Ecosim course at the ICM-CSIC, in collaboration with Ecopath International Research Initiative, and funded by ongoing projects Oceans Acción, GES4SEAS, Actnow, MOIRAI, and SURIMI.
23 people from 13 countries attended, all with different research questions to tackle with EwE. We had a week of great discussions and learning. Thanks for joining!
May 2025 – Master students day
The third edition of iMARES Master’s student day! We had very interesting presentations by 11 master students that started their projects in 2024-2025.
March 2025 – Marine Trophic Ecology workshop @ICM!
During 5 intense days, we have celebrated a super motivating workshop with the final goal to review traditional and novel applications and techniques studying trophic interactions of marine organisms in past, present and future ecosystems.
We aimed at discussing their main features, applications, advances, complementarities and limitations. The emphasis of the workshop was on methods such as chemical tags (stable isotopes, fatty acids, trace elements), genetics (DNA metabarcoding), visual observations (stomach content) and the analysis of different parts or tissues of organisms (otoliths, stomach contents, muscles, bones, eye lens…), as well as on modelling techniques.
Our iMARES team prepared a nice video to showcase the week.
A peer review publication in on the making!
December 2024 – PhD day
A new edition of iMARES PhD day with lots of interesting talks about student projects and discussions. And it follows with a nice pre-holidays lunch!
November 2024 – A new edition of the Ecopath with Ecosim course at ICM-CSIC
Another year, we organized an Ecopath with Ecosim course at the ICM-CSIC, in collaboration with Ecopath International Research Initiative, and funded by ongoing projects Oceans Acción, PROOCEANS, GES4SEAS, MarinePlan, Actnow, and EcoScopium.
22 people attended from different countries and with different research questions to tackle with EwE. We had a week of great discussions and learning, and we are thrilled with the interest shown by all participants!
November 2024 – We organize a species distributions modelling course
The first week of November 2024 we have held a fantastic species distributions modelling course at ICM-CSIC with the title “User friendly tools for spatial-temporal species distribution models“, by Alba Fuster-Alonso, Jorge Mestre-Tomás, Jazel Ouled-Cheikh, and Maria Grazia Pennino.
This course has been organized under the Spanish Project ProOceans, and the new R package Glossa has been presented and tested!
December 2023 – We organize a modelling course to study the effects of human activities on marine ecosystems
Modelling courses to study the effects of human activities on marine ecosystems are back at the ICM!
During the week of the 11th to the 15th of December 2023, the ICM hosted, once again, an ecosystem modelling course to teach participants from different institutions around the world how to use modelling techniques to study the effects of human activities and climate change on marine ecosystems.
In total, 20 participants from 13 countries (Romania, Germany, Denmark, South Africa, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, Holland, Greece, Italy and France) got together to learn about the ecosystem modelling approach Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE,). This course, organized under 7 European and National projects (Ges4Seas, ActNow, MarinePlan, FutureMares, EcoScope, Oceans+, and ProOceans), aimed to help participants with their modelling-related tasks, work packages and deliverables.
Ecosystem modelling courses were frequently taught at ICM before 2019, and starting with this course, the intention is to organize them again on annual basis. These courses are a great opportunity for the scientific community to get introduced to one of the most applied ecological modelling tools in the world, while meeting participants from all over the world and learn about the recent developments of the approach.
A three-day introductory course was followed by a two-day advanced course. The introductory course discussed basic concepts and procedures modelling aquatic ecosystems using the EwE approach. Participants were provided with the principles behind EwE, and how to design, parameterize and analyze an ecological model. Introductory concepts of the temporal module Ecosim and the spatial-temporal module Ecospace were presented.
The advanced course discussed in-depth principles of Ecospace. Special focus was paid to how to use EwE to study the impacts of cumulative stressors, including the impact of climate change, and the effects of alternative management options of marine resources to move towards adaptation and mitigation of human activities under global change.
The course was taught by a team of core scientists behind EwE: Villy Christensen (University of British Columbia, Canada), Jeroen Steenbeek (Ecopath International Initiative, Spain) and Marta Coll (Institute of Marine Science, Spain). Three teaching assistants completed the team: Elena Lloret and Dorota Szalaj, from ICM, and Riikka Puntilla-Dodd, from Åbo Akademi University (Finland).
December 2023 – PhD Day
We have celebrated a PhD day in our group with lots of interesting talks about student projects and discussions. Especial connections from Australia, Norway and USA have been a treat.
