Pat Livingston is New Head of REFM Division

Patricia A. Livingston was appointed Director of the Center’s Resource Ecology and Fisheries Management (REFM) Division effective 9 January 2005. Pat has a long and successful career at the Center working on issues of critical importance to REFM, the Center, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). She is recognized as an expert in the field of multispecies ecology and also is regarded as one of the best supervisors at the Center.

Pat received a B.S. in Fisheries from Michigan State University (1976), M.S. in quantitative fisheries management from the University of Washington (1980), and M.P.A. in natural resource administration and policy from the University of Washington (1988). She has been a fishery research biologist with the Center since 1977 and served as head of the REFM Division’s Trophic Interaction Group (1984-1996) and Program Manager of the Division’s Resource Ecology and Ecosystem Modeling Program (1997-2004).

Pat’s main research focus has been to implement various ecosystem and upper-trophic level models of the North Pacific. Her research has centered mainly on understanding groundfish trophic interactions relative to marine birds and mammals, particularly in the eastern Bering Sea. She developed and implemented a biological collection and analysis program for fish food habits research. She has authored more than 50 publications many of which relate to groundfish predation and population models incorporating predation, with particular emphasis on cannibalism by walleye pollock in the eastern Bering Sea. She has been involved in and also led numerous research planning and science plan development workshops for cooperative ecosystem research in the eastern Bering Sea.

Pat served as a leader in building a database documenting groundfish food habits, particularly in the eastern Bering Sea, providing important information for understanding groundfish feeding ecology, marine food webs and parameterizing upper-trophic level models of predation and bioenergetics of groundfish populations. She has worked to integrate ecosystem research into the fishery management arena and on coordinating an ecosystem status report for the eastern Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska regions to accompany the groundfish stock assessment advice that goes to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. This work has involved developing ecosystem status and management indicators, and implementing a framework for assessing the ecosystem impacts of fishing.

Pat has been an affiliate faculty member of the University of Washington School of Fisheries since 1989. She has served in various capacities on scientific committees and programs of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) including co-chairman of the Climate Change and Carrying Capacity program and chairman of the PICES Science Board. She was recently appointed as a member of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee. She is looking forward to the new challenges of directing and coordinating research at the division level.

By Susan Calderón

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AFSC Quarterly Research Reports Jan-Mar 2005