Alan Longhurst

Longhurst has published more than 80 research papers and his most recent books are "Ecological Geography of the Sea" (1st edition 1998, 2nd edition 2007) and "Mismanagement of Marine Fisheries" (2010). He has also written on "Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science" from a personal perspective. In retirement since 1995, he and his wife Françoise run Galerie l'Acadie, a gallery of contemporary art in Cajarc, France.

The first edition of the Ecological Geography of the Sea (1998) dealt only with the planktonic ecosystem. It was reviewed in Nature, Science, Limnology and Oceanography, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution, amongst others. The second edition (2007) included considerations of the strong coupling between benthic and pelagic processes that occurs over continental shelves, and between plankton and larger pelagic organisms.

An initial proof-of-concept for the Ecological Geography of the Sea was demonstrated by estimating global primary production using satellite radiometer data partitioned into biogeochemical domains and provinces. This influential work was published in 1995 with co-authors Shubha Sathyendranath, Trevor Platt, and Carla Caverhill, and stands as the most highly cited paper in the Journal of Plankton Research. Parenthetically, the first paper in the first issue of the first volume of this journal which appeared in 1979 was also authored by Longhurst.

In 1988, Longhurst was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1991, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada for his cumulative influence in the development of Canadian oceanography. In 1997, he received the A.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography "in recognition of sustained excellence in the study of marine food webs and biogeography, and of outstanding leadership in the development of international collaboration and in the administration of world-renowned oceanographic programs".

Early in his career, Longhurst studied the ecology of benthic communities and demersal fish on the continental shelf of the Gulf of Guinea (1954-1963) during service at the West African Fisheries Research Institute in Freetown, Sierra Leone and the Federal Fisheries Service in Lagos, Nigeria. In the middle of this early period, he took a job for less than a year in Wellington at the Fishery Department of New Zealand and worked on racial differences in snappers. Subsequently, he focused on the trophic structure and flux of energy through the pelagic ecosystems of the eastern Pacific Ocean (1963-1971), the Barents Sea (1973), the eastern Canadian Arctic (1983-1989) and the Northwest Atlantic Ocean (1978-1994). He coordinated the international EASTROPAC expeditions in the 1960s and was the first Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center of the US National Marine Fisheries Service in La Jolla, California (1967-1971). Returning to England in 1971, he accepted a position as the Deputy Director of the Institute for Marine Environmental Research in Plymouth. Later, in Canada, he was Director of the Marine Ecology Laboratory at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Nova Scotia (1977-1979). His final administrative appointment was Director-General of that Institute (1980-1986). He later turned down the position of Assistant Deputy Minister of Science at the national headquarters of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Government of Canada) in favour of a going "back to the bench" as a research scientist.

After the war, he returned to London for a degree in entomology and then a doctoral degree in zoology (1952) at the Bedford College of the University of London (England) on the ecology and taxonomy of Notostraca, a small group of living‐fossil, fresh‐water crustaceans.

Alan Longhurst was born in Plymouth, England, the son of a naval dental surgeon. He spent four years in the British army, graduating from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst at the end of the war (1945). He then went to take part in the Allied occupation of Austria, ending up in Somalia and Abyssinia with the East African forces.

Alan Reece Longhurst (born 5 March 1925) is a British-born Canadian oceanographer who invented the Longhurst-Hardy Plankton Recorder, and is widely known for his contributions to the primary scientific literature, together with his numerous monographs, most notably the "Ecological Geography of the Sea". He led an effort that produced the first estimate of global primary production in the oceans using satellite imagery, and also quantified vertical carbon flux through the planktonic ecosystem via the biological pump. More recently, he has offered a number of critical reviews of several aspects of fishery management science and climate change science.