María Nube Szephegyi, Uruguay

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María Nube Szephegyi, Cetáceos Uruguay, Uruguay 

*-Organization Web site URL if any: www.cetaceos.org.uy.          E-mail

Curriculum Vitae          Researchgate          Linkedin

x2012Scholar  x2012Talk  xScholar xTalk  xMammal  xWhale  xEducation  xWildlife  xNGO  xFisheries  xEndangered  xMarine  xRemote  xCommunity  xDolphin 

Mar 2019 – Present    National Directorate of Environment,  Head of Coastal and Marine Management Department  Montevideo, Uruguay

Feb 2017 – Present    Head of ECOPlata/Freplata - Department of Coastal and Marine Management

Mar 2016 – Jan 2017    CEO Vida Silvestre Uruguay  Montevideo, Uruguay

Oct 2014 – Feb 2016    Wildlife Refuge Program  Montevideo, Uruguay

Nov 2010 – Aug 2013   Head of the Outreach Unit  Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República

         My main task was to lead the team to build bridges between scientists, students and community throw the design of interdisciplinary learning environments

 2006 – 2010 Arenas Project  Cetaceos Uruguay

         Arenas project was an initiative developed by three NGOs to promote environmental education in coastal schools. We worked jointly with around 100 teachers to define activities and approaches that ended up in the publication of the book Ecosistemas Costeros Uruguayos: una guía para su funcionamiento.

2016  TED TALK      “From emotion to motion in nature deficit times.”    (Espanol)     "Changing the world does not depend on international entities, is up to each one of us. With information and empathy, Maria Nube, propose how to turn our world into a better place for animals as well as humans." (Photo Below: Maria Ted Talk, courtesy Ted Talk website)

2012 Scholar Profile:

Cetaceos Uruguay participates in several regional groups focus on Conservation, as the Franciscana Consortium, where researchers and stakeholders join information and promote conservation policies in a regional basis.

I am one of the founding members of Cetaceos Uruguay, a non-profit organization focused on the research and conservation of marine mammals in Uruguay. As part of my work there, and as part of my master thesis I have worked with artisanal and industrial fishermen to know more about the endangered franciscana dolphin. I started to develop habitat use maps for this species, based on modeling hypotheses made by fishermen and other researchers, but I have faced many difficulties working with GIS, especially because I am trying to learn by myself, even when I receive lots of help from colleagues and conservation partners. In Uruguay there is an increasing demand on spatial information of endangered species (threats, habitat use patterns, density) and sometimes we do not have enough tools to face this demand. I would like to highlight that the training gathered with you would be shared to these colleagues and partners with whom have an informal virtual net of GIS sharing.

HISTORY:

I started working on conservation in 2004, when we created our group Cetaceos Uruguay. Since then I have participated in several conservation programs, projects and activities. For example, I worked for 7 years with fishermen regarding by-catch (the information gathered during this project is the basis for my master thesis currently) and for 5 years with school teachers and coastal life guards on environmental education in coastal ecosystems, as part of the Arenas project that ended up with a book jointly written for school teachers and coastal educators (http://www.cetaceos.org.uy/publicaciones/arenas_final.pdf ).

 I specialized my Biology career at first in oceanography, and then was my first approach to GIS working on satellite imagery process and field observations (Surfer and SeaDAS softwares), during two training courses. Then, when I started my master on franciscana dolphin conservation I started to study quite a lot about Species Distribution Models and I can now manage (mainly after studying by my own and with some help from friends) with high difficulty, GIS packages in R and Arcmap. Now that I am nearly finishing my thesis I have created the very first by-catch spatial models, habitat suitability maps and Species distribution models for franciscana dolphin, which is the most endangered small cetacean in the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean, and considered of main concern for the Biodiversity conservation in Uruguay. This spatial information is extremely useful for the current National System of Protected Areas and for Environmental impact Evaluations of marine developments. Nowadays, Uruguay is promoting the oil industry and mining which will definitely cause effects in our coastal environments, but very little is known about the use that species make of our coastal and marine ecosystems. 

Please describe how you work in your local conservation and GIS community:

My work with fishermen has been the basis for the hypotheses of my thesis, and actually we discuss together the results obtained and how to show them. Besides, I work at the Outreach Unit from the Faculty of Science where we work hardly on environmental and conservation issues, promoting the involvement of researchers and communities in conservation, and also with the Geography department to develop social cartographies for local development (in this project I do not work with GIS, I work with community).

Regarding our local GIS community, I interact fluently with people working in the design and management of protected areas, and with partners working on land use and ocean conservation. We have created an informal network where we share our Arcgis discovers. For example, I met the MGET tool from one of them, who showed me even how to install it, and yesterday I showed others from the National Museum of Natural History to create fishnets and join information from other layers to know more about invertebrate and fish by-caught in shrimp artisanal nets. In Uruguay we are very few people (3.5 million in total) so the ones working on conservation and GIS are very few, many of us studied together or met at conservation groups, so the exchange is very fluent.

2012 Scholar Conference Presentation:

 “Involving Fishermen to Better Understand the Habitat Use of the Endangered Franciscana Dolphin in Uruguay: A New Hypothesis”

Since 2004 Franciscana Project has worked jointly with artisanal and industrial fishermen to know more about the incidental capture of the endangered franciscana dolphin. During this volunteer work, many hypotheses about the reasons why the animals were caught involved oceanographic and ecological issues. So, we decided to use the information gathered to develop habitat use models for the species, based on previous research background and fishermen’s hypotheses. Because we had presence-only data (captures and sightings) we used two different approaches to develop maps. One such is based on Maximum entropy models, that compare iteratively environmental data associated to the presence locations and background points. The second one is based on logistic regressions with Generalized Linear Models, using occurrence information and what is known as pseudo-absences (generated for modeling purposes). We then generated 5 pseudo-absence data sets to model the relation among franciscana presence and environmental and physiographic features and possible feeding grounds from the Uruguayan coast, provided by international and national sources. We used ArcMap 9.2 to generate the pseudo-absences and the predictor layers to run the 6 models and to develop spatial predictions of presence probabilities based on each model. With this work we have now the first habitat use models for the species, with different levels of accuracy and prediction capability. But the peculiarity of these maps, highly requested by the resources management agencies, is that they were created combining fishermen local knowledge and updated information from regional and global research.