Achievements with Foreign Colleagues at Conference in Svetlogorsk

The seventh International Conference on Commercial Oceanography begins today in Svetlogorsk in the Kaliningrad Region. The conference will run until September 14. It is being held to mark the 100th anniversary of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).

According to Piotr Chernyshkov, the deputy chairman of the conference's organising committee and the head of the Department of Oceanic Bio-resources at the Atlantic Research Institute for Fisheries and Oceanography, Russia was one of the founders of the ICES and her scientists have played a leading role in establishing and developing international commercial oceanography. Unfortunately, in the past decade the scale of Russian research has been steadily declining. Along with a failure to present enough results of research to the international community, this is leading to a situation where many international projects are finding solutions to problems which have already been successfully solved by Russian researchers. These problems directly affect the Russian fishing industry because the scientific commitment of countries to studying the world's oceans is taken into account by international organisations when setting quotas for resources.

Consequently, said Chernyshkov, one of the main aims of the conference is to set out the most important results of Russian research over the last few years. The forum's results will be published as a collection of papers.