To celebrate Earth Month, and following on from our #30DaysofConservationOptimism, the Society for Conservation Biology Oceania is hosting a webinar “Conservation optimism across the moana of Aotearoa New Zealand”.

All are welcome, globally! Community members, conservation practitioners, researchers, policy-makers, and students are encouraged to attend. This webinar will feature two wonderful speakers discussing conservation action in and on the waters of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Gaia Dell’Ariccia is a senior seabird scientist at the Auckland Council Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring Unit, and a true passionate seabird geek. After a PhD in birds’ behaviour at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, she started studying seabirds in 2007 travelling to seabirds’ islands around the world, from Italy, to the Canary Islands, form the Selvagens Islands to the French Subantarctic Territories. She arrived in Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau 6 years ago and she’s now leading the Auckland Council Regional Seabird Monitoring and Research Programme.

Jochen Zaeschmar is a German-born, New Zealand-based conservation biologist with the Far Out Ocean Research Collective which he founded in 2017. The Collective has a strong focus on the collaborative and cross-cultural study of oceanic megafauna. After his first encounters with New Zealand false killer whales in 2000 he initiated a dedicated research program in 2005. Jochen completed his MSc on the social organization of the species at Massey University in Auckland in 2014 and continues to monitor false killer whales through field work and a dedicated citizen scientist program. Habitat use and social structure of oceanic delphinids remain his core research subjects. As part of this, the work on various aspects of false killer whale population dynamics continues with particular focus on the near-permanent association with oceanic common bottlenose dolphins, as well as spatio- temporal aspects of habitat use.