About us

WIOMweb Team

Hugo Selbie - SENIOR Project Manager

Hugo has a bachelor’s degree in Marine Geography from Cardiff University, and a Master’s from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He is a California Sea Grant State Fellow alumnus, and has worked at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, examining how conservation policy can be implemented by effective strategies. He is currently working for the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) on the interface between policy and science, facilitating communication between policy makers and scientists to develop coastal ecosystem policy. Hugo pioneered the project in 2004, and has been overseeing the content and implementation.

Raj Roy - Project Manager and designer

Raj has a bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Oxford University, and has been working for Blue Ventures for the past 3 years as the Operations Manager. His roles include e-marketing, graphics and web design, and he has managed the redesign of Blue Ventures’ websites and communication templates. He is also the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Technician, responsible for mapping projects. Raj has been managing the WIOMweb project, supervising the design and contributing some coding towards the project.

Dr Sophia Vader - Development & Coding

Sophie has a bachelor’s degree in Ecology from King’s College London, and a PhD in population dynamics from Imperial College London. Since her doctorate, she has trained as a developer, and has worked on both small scale and enterprise applications as a developer and business analyst. Recently, she has worked as a database developer at the Royal Horticultural Society; intranet developer at Baker & McKenzie; on social networking sites and bespoke CMS development for New Media Limited, and has advanced experience of ASP, VB, C#, MySQL, PHP, XML and AJAX. Sophie has coded the MySQL and PHP integration for WIOMweb.

 

WIOMWeb Researchers

Alice Miller

Emily Carroll

Sophie Benbow

Charlotte Gough

Charlotte Coombes

Leanne Atkinson

 

Blue Ventures Conservation

Blue Ventures is a UK-based not-for-profit organisation dedicated to marine conservation and research. WIOMweb was born out of a project developed by Blue Ventures to document the marine and coastal biodiversity at Blue Ventures’ field research station in Andavadoaka, southwestern Madagascar.

The project’s aim was to incorporate photographs of marine and coastal species into a web-based taxonomic database, to create an online education and reference tool for students and researchers in the region.  

The project began in 2003 and was spearheaded at the time by Blue Ventures’ Dive Manager, Dan Logan. The initiative moved forward with the involvement of zoologist and keen underwater photographer, Kit Gillibrand, who took many of the excellent photographs included on this website.

In 2004, Hugo Selbie pioneered the first draft of WIOMweb, then a training tool for research volunteers, incorporated in the Blue Ventures website. WIOMweb has since progressed to its current form, allowing navigation from kingdom through to species levels with interactive links at each stage, as well as links to research and popular science internet resources.

To find out more about Blue Ventures please click here.

 

WIOMweb

WIOMweb is a work in progress, and as the project continues to develop each species page will include an exact taxonomic breakdown, specific identification cues, preferred habitats and conservation status from the IUCN Red List.  Its aim is to make this information freely available to provide a reference database for students from secondary education through to professional taxonomists.

This project has been vastly improved using the web which represents an extremely powerful education tool for research and conservation alike. It boasts the ability to bring cutting edge reference materials to remote areas such as the Western Indian Ocean. The database is easily and quickly updated, reflecting the latest research and images. Perhaps most importantly, it allows for greater participation of users, who can make their own contributions to a shared knowledge base.

The project received a major boost in 2005 following a marine biodiversity study in southern Madagascar, organised by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and funded by Conservation International (CI).  Reef biologists, Dr Gerry Allen and Dr Douglas Fenner, provided invaluable input and contributions to the fish and corals contained on this website. 

To date, 700 species of marine vertebrates and invertebrates from southwestern Madagascar, Chagos and Rodrigues have been collated and used as the basis of this prototype database.

The total number will increase as the project is expanded to include additional taxa across a wider geographic area, and as additional images are gathered from participating research centres and institutions around the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region.

It is hoped that the WIOMweb database will provide a taxonomic reference resource of benefit to regional and international researchers and coastal management practitioners.  It has a much broader application as an educational tool, as the database can be used by undergraduates, secondary school biology students, divers, and anyone with a general interest in the marine natural history of the region.

We welcome comments, suggestions and advice from users of this resource.