Summer schools

Looking for activities this summer? You will find here the list of summer schools provided by TRIATLAS and its partners as well as all the necessary information and presentation of past summer schools. 

Summer School on Ocean, Climate, and Marine Ecosystems

Tamandaré, September 25th to October 1st, 2022

CANEMS organized a summer school at the CEPENE / ICMBio Marine Research Centre in Tamandaré, Brazil, in the last week of September 2022. The summer school was organized together with the host university, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), and the TRIATLAS and TAPIOCA projects. Learn more about the participants’ experience in the video above and in this post.

Nansen Tutu TRIATLAS Summer School on Ocean, Climate, and Marine Ecosystems

Cape Town, January 14th to 21st

The impacts of global warming, fisheries, and pollution are threatening marine ecosystems all around the World. It is thus crucial to improve understanding of these impacts and to develop the capacity to predict future changes in the marine ecosystem to inform the sustainable management of human activities. In this context, TRIATLAS and the Nansen Tutu Centre have held a very successful summer school on ocean, climate and marine ecosystem.

The summer school brought together master, PhD and early career researchers together from physical and biological oceanography, and from climate research, from Brazil, Africa, and Europe. In a somewhat unconventional manner, we ran the summer school partly as a workshop to initiate participants into the exciting field of interdisciplinary research. A new generation of interdisciplinary researchers is needed to solve the major challenges facing the Atlantic ecosystem and that are being addressed by the EU H2020 TRIATLAS project.

The six intense days of lectures, interdisciplinary group work were broken with a weekend with visits to scenic nearby sites including to Cape Point – the most south western point Africa, particularly fitting as it is the start of one of the Benguela region that is a main focus area of the TRIATLAS project. This provided participants an excellent opportunity to get to know each other better and to form lasting collaborations that for many will be important to perform their work in TRIATLAS.

The summer school was a resounding success, with the participating students and early career researchers asking for new opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange. This message has been delivered to the EU H2020 CSA AANChOR project that aims to strengthen cooperation in research and innovation across the entire Atlantic, in support of the Belem declaration. We hope that AANChOR may help support such future activities through its capacity strengthening platform.

Here we provide an overview of the format of the summer school, as well as the five short reports from the group work on what was learned and what they see as future research directions. We conclude with a summary of the group discussion on the final day that synthesizes the outcomes of the summer school and provides recommendations for following related summer schools.

The summer school website provides a complete overview of the program, with uploaded lectures and other teaching material, and summary presentations from the five groups.

Sponsors

The summer school was sponsored by European Union’s Horizon 2020 TRIATLAS project, grant agreement No 817578), Nansen-Tutu Centre, and the German funded BANINO project.

Objectives, organisation, and format of summer school

Scientific Organising Committee

Noel Keenlyside (UiB, Norway), Lynne Shannon (UCT, South Africa), Mathieu Rouault (UCT, South Africa), Ronaldo Angelini (UFRN, Brazil) , Peter Brandt (GEOMAR, Germany), and Ralf Schwamborn (UFPE)

Objectives

The main aim of the summer school was to initiate new interdisciplinary research needed to address issues facing the Atlantic related to the impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic factors (e.g., fisheries) on the marine ecosystem. A second aim of the summer school was to form long-lasting collaborations among researchers working on these issues within the TRIATLAS and related projects.

Format

There were six days of lectures. The first day began with an introduction to the goals of the summer school and an overview of the TRIATLAS project. This was followed by three lectures on the marine ecosystems in the two focus regions of the TRIATLAS region (North East Brazil and Southern Benguela) and on the status of climate prediction in the Atlantic. In the afternoon the participants gave five minute presentations to introduce themselves. There was also a lecture on indicator time series of marine ecosystems. 

The following four days covered physical oceanography and observations, climate and biophysical modelling and prediction, the human dimension, and marine ecosystem modelling. On each day, morning overview lectures provided the participants with a common background on observations, theory, analysis and modelling techniques. While in the afternoon group work provided a practical introduction to interdisciplinary research. There were five groups composed of expertise from the fields of oceanography, and climate and marine ecosystems research, and with a mix of early career and PhD and master students.

Early career researchers prepared the exercise on observations and oceanography (Mesmin Awo, Juliano Dani, Rodrigue Imbol, Philip Tuchen, Sadegh Yari) and on climate prediction (Hadi Bordbar, Lander Crespo, Iñigo Gómara, Arielle Stela Imbol). These researchers also let the discussions within their groups. At the end of these days the groups had 12 minutes present what they had learned.

On the final day the groups were given time to prepare presentations summarizing what they had learned, and what they thought were key gaps in understanding and important future research directions.