SEA CHANGES: Thresholds in Human Exploitation of Marine Vertebrates

SeaChanges is an EU Horizon 2020 international doctoral training network spanning archaeology and marine biology, which supports 15 fully-funded PhD projects across seven institutions in 6 countries. The network takes a long-term perspective on human exploitation of marine vertebrates, with projects covering species from herring to sperm whale, timescales from decades to millennia, and all of Europe's seas and beyond. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813383.

I am supervising Emily Ruiz Puerta (ESR8) who researching long-term human-walrus interactions. Her co-supervisors are Sean Desjardins (Groningen) and Morten Tange Olsen (Copenhagen). Her PhD will will analyse archaeological walrus aDNA samples held in repositories in Canada and Denmark to elucidate genetic diversity across the region before impacts of industrial hunting. Her PhD is based at the Arctic Centre, Groningen, with an extended secondment at Copenhagen.

This international PhD training network examines long-term impacts of human exploitation of marine vertebrates, focusing on species ranging from herring and walrus through to sperm whale.