Ayumi Kuramae Izioka

 

Ayumi is currently working for the Saba Conservation Foundation as the Saba Bank National Park Officer. She was born in Brazil in a city 400km from sea (which is still considered close to shore). Although she lived relatively far from the sea, she always was attracted to the water. One of her first dives was in the Caribbean and soon followed by dives at the Great Barrier Reef. That is when she realized she wanted to become part of a conservation team to help protect these beautiful ecosystems for the future.

 

Ayumi pursued her undergrad in Coastal and Marine Management with a major in marine biology. This track took her to many places and her work resulted in many advisory reports for local governments. Her first  project was completed on Saba where together with Wageningen Marine Research, she mapped all of the coral reefs, sea grass beds, and sand patches of the Saba Marine Park. Ayumi continued regional research on sustainable fishing of the queen conch population in Anguilla and completed her thesis on waste management in St. Eustatius. She conducted many volunteer projects studying marine turtles, underwater videos systems, aquatic ecology and much more. With her great broad experience, she was asked to build artificial reefs for Saba and St. Eustatius in 2017.

 

Through the years, she kept coming back to Saba which resulted in her coordinating science projects on the Saba Bank (a large submarine atoll covering approximately 2.200km2 and the largest of its kind in the Atlantic Ocean.) Nowadays she works together with many different research institutes and universities, such as MOTE marine lab, Wageningen Marine Research, Van Hall Larenstein etc. as part of her current role at the Saba Conservation Foundation. This year she has her own project collecting data from the lionfish trapping program on the Saba Bank and kicked off two shark tagging programs together with Oceaware and the Dutch Elasmobranch Society.

 

We will be updating our calendar with activity dates and times as we continue to coordinate our event. Stay tuned!

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