GESTAR II Seminar Series, Thursday, May 8th, 11:00am

Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. Skylar Bayer, NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office. Her talk is titled "Alaska Regional Office Habitat Conservation Division: Essential Fish Habitat Science and Management."

Date and Time: Thursday, May 8, 2025 at 11:00am EST

Join us via Teams.

"NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office (AKRO) Habitat Conservation Division (HCD) is responsible for identifying and conserving essential fish habitat (EFH) as mandated by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Our habitat conservation activities include protecting EFH, mitigating damage to and enhancing habitat affected by hydropower project construction and operations, removing invasive species, and restoring habitat that has been affected by development, oil spills, and other human activities. We focus on habitats used by federally-managed fish species located offshore, nearshore, in estuaries, and in freshwater areas important to migratory salmon. This presentation will primarily highlight our EFH databases and their applied use in the fishery management council process and consultations."

Skylar Bayer is a marine habitat resource specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office. She is trained as a marine ecologist with expertise in shellfish population dynamics, invertebrate life history, fertilization ecology, extension work, and science communication. Prior to joining the Habitat Conservation Division, Skylar held a faculty position at Roger Williams University overseeing their Shellfish Program. In 2021, she studied Iceland scallop population dynamics as a Fulbright Scholar with Icelandic government scientists. She previously worked with NOAA as a NRC Postdoctoral Research Associate with the NMFS Milford Lab and as a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow in the U.S. Senate. She earned her Ph.D. in Marine Biology in 2017 from the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, her M.Sc. from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Biological Oceanography in 2011, and her B.Sc. in Marine Biology from Brown University in 2008. She has worked with The Story Collider as a producer, a non-profit dedicated to science storytelling, since 2014.

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.