Save Our Seas Foundation announces new Keystone Grant winners for 2017

Save Our Seas Foundation is proud to announce our new Keystone Grant winners for 2017!

The Save Our Seas Foundation is committed to protecting our oceans by funding and supporting research, conservation and education projects worldwide, focusing primarily on charismatic threatened wildlife and their habitats. Our Keystone Grant aims to provide funding for projects that run over multiple years.

For this funding cycle, we made a special call for projects that would support the recovery of sawfishes, the world’s most endangered elasmobranch.

The new Save Our Seas Foundation Keystone Grant projects for 2017 are:

Sawfish projects

Grant winner: Colin Simpfendorfer
Location: Global
Project: SOSF Global Sawfish Search

Grant winner: Dharmadi Dharmadi
Location: Jakarta, Indonesia
Project: Sawfish status in Indonesia

Grant winner: Gregg Poulakis
Location: Florida, USA
Project: Using environmental DNA to detect smalltooth sawfish in current and historical nursery sites

Grant winner: Nicole Philipps
Location: Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA
Project: Comparison of levels of genetic diversity in historic and contemporary sawfish populations

Grant winner: Nigel Downing Mukiwa
Location: Senegal, West Africa
Project: Status of sawfish in the Casamance River, Senegal, West Africa

Grant winner: Ramon Bonfil
Location: Mexico
Project: Conservation and Ecological Research of smalltooth and largetooth sawfishes in Mexico

Grant winner: William White
Location: Papua New Guinea
Project: Investigation of the status of sawfishes (Pristidae) in Papua New Guinea

Dean Grubbs holds a juvenile sawfish during a 2016 research expedition in the Florida Keys. Photo by Nadia Bruyndonckx

Other projects

Grant winner: Daniela Vilema
Location: Galapagos, Ecuador
Project: Charles Darwin Foundation – Galapagos Marine Education Program

Grant winner: Dylan Irion
Location: Mossel Bay, South Africa
Project: Estimating the Abundance of the White Shark in Southern Africa with an Integrated Population Model

Grant winner: Marianne Porter
Location: Florida, USA
Project: Migration mechanics: understanding swimming kinematics of a marine apex predator

Grant winner: Naiti Morales Serrano
Location: Easter Island, Chile
Project: Lost fishes of Easter Island – Papa Nui Expedition

Grant winner: Nicholas Pilcher
Location: Iran
Project: Impact of extreme climatic conditions on reproductive biology of endangered sea turtles in Iran

Grant winner: Rigers Bakiu
Location: Tirane, Albania
Project: Beginning of Sharks Conservation in Albanian Territorial Waters by Performing Fisheries Survey and Sensitizing Communities

Grant winner: Terence Vel
Location: St Joseph Atoll, Seychelles
Project: A comparative terrestrial biodiversity assessment of D’Arros Island and St Joseph Atoll

We look forward to working with these researchers and seeing their projects develop over the next few years.