The MCPC role enables SAERI to continue to support FIG through the provision of expertise, and advice to contribute to evidence-based decision making in collaboration with partners, stakeholders and the local community to deliver three main outcomes:

Narissa has a PhD from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia, where she specialised on deep sea coral biodiversity, biogeography, connectivity, phylogenetics and conservation – across the Antarctic continental shelf and slope, the sub-antarctic, Patagonia and South West Atlantic. Her research agenda as a benthic-ecologist is open to meaningful collaborations, and currently includes the Antarctic Seabed Carbon Capture Change (ASCCC) project which aims to understand the function of polar and subpolar seabeds in the carbon cycle ‘Antarctic blue carbon’.

Narissa has worked as a marine scientist in tropical, temperate and polar environments, including five Antarctic field seasons, diving in Patagonia, conservation planning in Myanmar and specimen-based research in natural history collections around the world. She has witnessed some of Earth’s most spectacular biodiversity across a career inspired by Indonesia’s coral triangle ~17 years ago, and is looking forward to exploring the Falkland Islands over the next two and half years. In order to foster long-term research capacity over this time-frame, she hopes to coordinate at sea sampling and technology in unexplored mesophotic ecosystems (~30 – 100m) – where preliminary investigations have identified new biodiversity habitats in 2021. Including three previously unrecorded local marine-scapes, the first records for stylasterid coral assemblages, rhodolith beds (coralline algae nodules), and reef-like aggregations of parchment worms. Due to the rare frontier location of the Falklands at the intersection of the South Atlantic and Subantarctic – this research encompasses a vast geographic area of globally unique Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs), and advances biodiversity protection and nature-based solutions to climate change.