Kristen spent her spare time in her undergraduate degree working in the dive industry, completing her PADI Divemaster and volunteering as a research assistant on marine conservation projects in Australia, Spain, and Indonesia. Kristen has extensive experience working in remote field locations, particularly at sea. This fostered Kristen’s research focus of working directly with fishers, industry and community, with a goal of improving long-term sustainability of fisheries, particularly in tropical reefs.

Kristen is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Newcastle, in Collaboration with Macquarie University, researching sea cucumber population dynamics on the Great Barrier Reef. This work combines remote sensing techniques, fishery biology and ecology, and collaboration between the Queensland Sea Cucumber Fishery, Fishwell Consulting, Industry and Managers. Kristen is examining the trends and drivers of harvest from the 28 years of catch records from the QLD sea cucumber fishery, collecting independent occurrence and ecology data from underwater surveys, conducted by a remotely operated vehicle, and will use a combination of these fishery dependent and independent data to create predictive species distribution models of sea cucumbers, across the GBR.

Twitter: @_krisfish Google Scholar: Kristen McSpadden