Guest Post – The Mares Collection

Guest blog post from Tim Deprez & Katherine Brownlie of Ghent University

The organisers of the Mares Conference on Marine Ecosystems Health and Conservation 2016 (Feb 1-5, 2016) are pleased to have made an arrangement with PeerJ to create a themed ‘proceedings’ Collection.

This conference is an initiative of the MARES Joint Doctoral Programme and EuroMarine Network and expects to attract around 200 attendees from across the globe. It presents a unique opportunity to bring together marine researchers, scientists, educators, and policymakers to address the main issues regarding the impact of human activities on the natural marine environment. The conference will be dynamic and innovative, by providing a mixture of oral presentations, scientific exhibitions and training workshops. More information on the conference can be found at www.maresconference.eu.

Marine environments are generally considered as highly valuable and their health and conservation status are seen as key priorities, however, marine wildlife and habitats are facing multiple anthropogenic threats ranging from eutrophication to overfishing and ocean acidification. There is an urgent need to advance our understanding of the threats to the marine environment and to provide constructive guidelines for conservation and management strategies. The second Mares Conference will take place in this context, aiming to address the main issues regarding marine ecosystems health and conservation.

Scientific sessions will gather presentations covering Future Oceans, Natural Resources, Biodiversity Effects, Biological Invasions, Ocean Noise Pollution and Habitat Loss themes. Open access will be promoted by inviting presenters to share their posters and exhibited material with conference attendees or the public at large through PeerJ PrePrints.

All the articles that are submitted to PeerJ will be collated together into a ‘Mares Conference 2016 Collection‘. Delegates will be encouraged to write up their conference papers as formal ‘journal articles’ and submit them for full peer-review to ‘PeerJ’. All the journal content which is published will also appear in our Collection and so it will then represent a complete record of the conference.

For more information about the conference visit http://www.maresconference.eu