Craig Smith

Research

Craig Smith is a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research and conservation efforts have focused on the vast and poorly understood deep sea and Antarctica, where high diversity, fragile habitats, and slow recovery rates cause ecosystems to be especially sensitive to human impacts and climate change. Smith has conducted research in Antarctica, mangroves, submarine canyons, whale-fall communities, cold seeps, continental slopes, and abyssal plains to obtain a broad perspective of natural and stressed marine ecosystems. With his Pew fellowship, Smith conducted workshops and drafted recommendations to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and other international agencies on the design of marine protected area networks for seamount systems impacted by trawl fisheries; for abyssal nodule regions targeted for mining; and for hydrothermal-vent and cold-seep ecosystems impacted by mining, fishing, and other activities. The ISA has provisionally adopted the recommendations from Smith’s Pew fellowship work to place 1.44 million square kilometers in the abyssal Pacific nodule region in a system of protected areas that are off-limits to mining in order to safeguard biodiversity from future manganese nodule mining activities. To learn more about Smith, visit his bio online.