Summary Report
APBON 8th Web Seminar

1. Date: 8th July, 2021
Time: 15:00-17:00 in Japanese Standard Time
(13:00-15:00 in Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam), (11:45-13:45 in Nepal)(14:00-16:00 in Malaysia, Philippines, China), (7/7 20:00-22:00 in Hawaii )2. Location, Participants
・Webex Meeting Room・18 participants (14 participants and 4 from secretariat) from 7 Nationalities
・MC: Dr. Takeuchi (National Institute for Environmental Studies)
3. Program:Opening and Announcement:
Secretariat of APBON (Ms. Neagari: Biodiversity Center of Japan)
・Greetings from Ms. Neagari from APBON Secretariat
・Welcomed all of the participants to join this 8th APBON web seminar
・The agenda and rules of the meeting were proposed
・Introduced today’s MCPresentation1:
Dr. Po Teen LIM (University of Malaya)“Dynamics of benthic harmful algae assemblage at coral reef ecosystems”
Summary of presentation
In this session, Dr. Po Teen LIM shared his research in HABs especially benthic
harmful algal. He said he has been working on this topic related to harmful algal for thepast 20 years and benthic HABs was a topic of concern because of ciguatera fish
poisoning. And he also explained why HAB is so important and what we can do tominimize the social economy impacts due to HAB, especially, related to benthic HAB,
and why we want to look at that in respect to the ecosystem changes especially in acoral reef ecosystem. So he used some from studies conducted in Perhentian island
fringing coral reef, a marine park on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia.

Q&A Session
Q: You showed that toxic algae is expanding to the higher latitude and you mentioned
about the effect of climate change and I was wondering if that these toxic algae also
have characteristic to adapt other environment very quickly? Species has capacity sothey can adapt to the different elements and environment so in that case you may see
difference between the population in the original area and the expanded area. Do you
have any idea about this?
A: Gambierdiscus species are a group of dinoflagellates known to responsible forciguatera fish poisoning. It is confined the tropical and subtropical water,. Based on a
study by Japanese researchers, now they're seeing occurrence of Gambierdiscus in
Honshu island. So that's sort of study have raised questions on northward expansion ofGambierdiscus species. Good historical data available in Japan, Gambierdiscus are
now being reported in several parts of Shikoku and Honshu island site, and from thatstudy they conclude that ciguatera fish poisoning was no longer confined to Okinawa
but expanded northward. So I think that is how the CFP and benthic HAB are that
related to global warming t
Q: Can you predict the next toxic algae bloom?
A: Many researchers are trying to very hard in early warning and prediction becausethat is very important to reduce the economy impact to reduce the threat to publichealth. And for subtropical order on temperate region and the window of bloom
normally is from early spring to summer. For example if they see increase in cellnumbers in the water column in the case of planktonic bloom during monitoring of algal
blooms, the monitoring program will be intensifed during the early spring to summer.
At the same time, all of the shellfish will be tested and those toxic shellfish will bebanned from the market. At this stage, we can have early warming

ahead for twoweeks. but I don't think we can do anything earlier than that. So I guess that is still
depend very much on monitoring efforts.
Q: I am wondering, we can monitoring the HAB, but we found observing HAB harmful
algal blooms and reduce it is not easy, is there any case studies working on that?

For

example I’ve heard that aqua culture sometimes they move the locations, I think it's aonly one possibility, but I don't hear another options just spend the their product orsomething like that. So is there any case study in your regions in your knowledges?

A: The mitigation method depends on country and region. For example for finfish
cultures (marine cultures) in east Asia eg. Japan Korea and China, , when theyencounter one Margalefedinium polykrikoides (previously known as Cochlodinium
polykrikoides) blooms approaching a mariculture area, clay spraying will be applied
stop the bloom from approaching or close to the farm area.

I think that is one

mitigation approach that help to settle down the bloom and help to stop the bloom fromapproaching to the farm.
So of course that clay spraying method has its own disadvantage because when you
spray clays to the coastal ecosystem, you are introducing pollutant with potential
impacts and consequences to the benthic organism. , especially areas near to coral reef
also and to avoid environmental problem to the benthic community.
In terms of new method, they are various types of method available with differences incost and effective of treatment. In China there’s developing mitigation method withozone, which is very similar to ship ballast water treatment system. All the ship ballast
water will be treated before it is release. This is essential for shipping industries tocomply with Ballast water convention and regulations of International maritime
Organization (IMO). I know some chemical treatments that that might work to stop thebloom. The best approach that we have now is monitor and detect the blooms earlier toreduce or to minimize the impact. Increase the aeration in the area by having a physicalbarrier to stop the farm from exposing the bloom, hopefully the current will bring themaway in a very short time
Q: Is there any possibilities to consider the community plankton because I heard that in
the time of the highly polluted honey you don't get its era intermarry I have a room but
it was not toxic sometimes but recently toxic algal bloom happening more frequently
than past. Also it'll be a little of reduction of the nitrification. I'm wondering is it
possible to control all of the community level to reduce toxic algal bloom?
A: I guess there are several studies that related to that , for example the use of seaweed
polycultures, because by Prof.Imai from Hiroshima university, they found that themacro algae can release or hold some good bacteria that help to compete in a few
harmful algae, so that is one. They also study of using algicidal bacteria or virus
collected from the sediment produce them and release them back to help in terminationof bloom.
However, people are very concerned with the use of bacteria and virus, on whether thiswill cause some environmental issues. I guess that was the reason why those methods
were not widely applied to control the harmful algae bloom occurrences.
When we have more nutrients in our coastal waters, HAB species can survive in higher
nutrient environment will have better competitions compared to the species. A good
example was the Seto inland sea. Monitoring of HABs and shellfish toxicity will be thebest solution I mean you can’t remove HABs species completely from the environment.
Presentaton2:
Dr. Chaodong Zhu (Chinese Academy of Sciences)“Insect species delimitation and interaction networks”
Summary of presentation
He expressed his honored to be invited by APBON seminar to give this presentation on
what's going on in his lab. Comparing Dr. Lim’s presentation, which is related to thestory of deep sea, he delivered a story related to mountains that where they are carryingout their projects which is insect systematics and species interactions.
He emphasized that the insect systematics is actually basic approach to study species
interaction.
In this session, he delivered this presentation which is divided into two parts. First partis mainly part of dealing with insect taxonomy, and the second part is basing on theapproaches and techniques they established in the lab, and in this parts, he talked more
about species interactions in the mountain.
For insect systematics, he focused on functional insect groups which turn are actually
brought ecology, and his talk here were more focused on Pollinators, Parasitoids, andHerbivores.
In second prats, he gave the talk more about a story in the mountain. He showed two
scientific questions they’ve been keep working on in previous 8 years. Q1: The effects oftree diversity on plant-insect interaction network, Q2: The effects of climate change onplant, herbivores and predators. Several ongoing projects such as Nest trap system,
Predator system, and Herbivore system were introduced.
Q&A Session
Q: I’m wondering if some trades of the insects will also affect this relationship
A: Currently you can see in the projects going on in BEF site. We study different
functional groups at least for caterpillars, it's more positively connected with tree

diversity gradients, so that means because I did not explain very well on the experiment
but however in this in both BEF sites all trades are being planted a diversity gradient,like one species for one wood and two species in another plot and then going on to 24tree species and then we sample Herbivores, pollinators, and parasitoids in different
selected plots. So currently we found for Herbivores, microbes, and parasitoids, they are
all positively correlated but however for pollinators we did not find its way to correlated
with. Very recently we collaborated with Dr. Alice that we found tree diversity actually
has different kind of negative effects on bee diversity. I think this is kind of agreement.
General discussion and Information exchange- Information of GEO and AOGEO events (Alice, Hiroyuki)
It's great to talk to all so I was very pleased to present it to the GEO symposium lastmonth the theme of our session with anature based solutions and there was a reallyfantastic panel of people with very different experiences with several people based inSouth Africa as well as people based in Europe and America. And as I said the broad
theme of the session grows nature based solutions service included ecologicalaccounting and a number of other approaches to try to basically better quantify andaccount for ecosystem service provision including the financial dimensions and how
these kinds of things could be better integrated into global industries global targets.
Within my brief plenary because it was meant to be short plenaries and then adiscussion I went through the program go specific group as well as highlights from thepaper that was said earlier this year showing some of the board aims that we have as agroup and then in the synthesis session at the end we basically we talked more about
the need for data and the need for the better use of data to create sensible metrics sothat it can be better integrated with systems planning and management. But there
were some really useful perspectives there and those who were involved had lead
positions in a number of organizations as well as being responsible for developing things
like natural capital accounting.
So for those who attended and I think a number of people here were planning on
attending, it was a very useful session for anyone who wants to listen to that session or
any of the other sessions that were part of the AOGEO symposium, now recordings on
the site that could have caused the email drowned at the end and it has recordings ofnot just our plenary but all of the other plenaries from that session.
https://earthobservations.org/symposium2021.php
Comments:

Dr. Muraoka:
I watched them down the official is very good and exciting and I also appreciate Dr.
Alice that you made a nice and good presentation on behalf of APBON.
Dr. Alice:
It was a pleasure to represent the group then I also highlighted the paper showing ourwork plan and the message that we are using to both aggregate data disseminate dataand also network across this region.
Dr. Takeuchi:
Thank you so much for your talk. The nature based solution is quite important issues somaybe we can invite someone who familiar with this topic to this APBON seminarsometime.
Dr. Alice:
If it is of interest I'd be happy to give a webinar on that because it's a while since I gavethe last one and within my research group we have been using various approaches todevelop nature based solutions including some of China's tools like ecological red lines
and more recently swaps. So if that is of interest on happy to give one of the futurewebinars.
- Outcome of Management Committee meeting (June 18)
1) Pandemic in Parks
2) Function of Management Committee
3) Planning of APBON activities/ Three new members were invited who are Christian Elloran from ASEAN Centre ofBiodiversity, Bunthang Touch from IFReDI, and Sunita Chaundhary from ICIMOD.
/ APBON would be nice to have a kind of joint research data analysis for joint papers tofeature teacher feature be expected activities that the APBON find in there's a future
strategic plan to 2030.
/ The minutes of this part will be shared later and everyone here are very welcome tohave some more discussion by APBON mailing lists.

Comments:Dr.Alice: I think this is a fantastic idea we've talked about it a lot before and close it's areal compliment to the strategic plan. What we do need to think about is what thosethematic groups might look like and how we might generate ideas for those thematicgroups. I don't know if this is the time for all or if people want to think about it and thenemail in ideas for the thematic groups but I think having smaller more thematic groups
will help us achieve more and I'm really looking forward to seeing what that dialogue
brings. But the main question is how are we going to decide on what thematic groups tohave and it perhaps before on next seminar we could have generated a list of potential
thematic groups and then we can decide on chat box, so that we could move forward onthat.
Dr. Muraoka: Yes, sure. so let's try that then also of course I myself will try to findsomething some try to post them ideas to you all and because APBON is kind of veryflexible and inclusive network so any kind of ideas or thoughts from everyone arewelcome.
-Some more info about future seminar was shared as below.

Photo session: