 Professor at the Marine Science Institute, University of the Philippines, Diliman, I've been working for 37 years now. I began my work in 1980 as a master student of Professor Ed Gomez who's the founding director of the Marine Science Center, now the Marine Science Institute. I call my work over more than three decades, Experimental Marine Ecology. So that's a title of my talk now. And it has transitioned into work on complex systems. So the title is From Experimental Marine Ecology to Complex Systems. But in this work, I have to credit my students. That's why they're first acknowledged, no? It would not have been possible without a host of very talented, hardworking, dedicated graduate students beginning in the 1980s. My work began in 1980, like I said, with coral transplantation. Fortunately, there's still existing picture of me then. It is not digitized, so it's a bit rough. But that's me over there. I'm transplanting branches of a staghorn hard coral that's common in the Philippines. So my master's thesis was about studying how it grows after being transplanted to a new habitat. But I thought on my own that I could use this approach to also study coral physiology. Okay, so corals are animals. So they behave like all other animals. They respond to environmental factors like light, temperature, and stressors, okay? And a result of that is a paper published in the journal Marine Biology in 1984 looking at responses of coral to temperature and light. Because the Marine Science Institute is quite liberal in terms of the research we could get into and funding has really never been a problem, I was able to expand my research into what is called recruitment, okay? So I had a student as an example who was collecting tiles that we put down on the bottom. And what we were investigating was the different kinds of species on the reef that recruit on those tiles. That picture there is what we call a spaghetti sponge and it's causing a lot of problems on the reef in Bully now because it's competing with coral. We've been studying what we call the energy flow in that ecosystem. So the corals, they produce energy and other species on the reef consume the energy. So here's an example of an experiment we did about two decades ago where we incubated a sea cucumber inside a respiration chamber so we could measure its respiration, which we call energy consumption. This is set up in the laboratory. It's all improvised, studying the photosynthesis and respiration of different species on the reef. And that's an example of one of our publications with my graduate students, both of whom are now PhD degree holders. It's called energy flow and seasonality in the tropical coral reef flat. So that's a picture of my students about to go underwater using scuba. And I'm not in the picture because I'm the one taking the photo. And here's an example of some of our results, a simple energy budget for the coral reef flat in Bully now showing the values of energy production and consumption over a year. We used all of our past experience on coral transplantation, physiology, recruitment and energy dynamics to go into a more relevant thematic now, which is how reef communities are assembled over time. And the reason is we have so many degraded habitats in the marine environment. And we want to see if we could use this knowledge to actually assemble communities from scratch, meaning from bare substrate. And then we introduce coral colonies and then over time, the colonies recruit other species like fish and different invertebrates. And here's an example of a scientific paper that came out of that work. It's called local changes in community diversity after coral transplantation, published in the Journal Marine Ecology Progress series. And future generations of students have carried on this kind of work to see if coral can really be transplanted to degraded reef habitats in the effort to rehabilitate them. So this paper is called Successful Transplantation of a Fragmenting Coral with my erstwhile advisor Ed Gomez and two of my students, Patrick Kabaitan and Romy Dizon. Romy, by the way, is now faculty in UP Baguio. In fact, he became chair of the Department of Biology there. Finally, this is an interest I've been developing with the National Institute of Physics because the theory of complex systems derives from physics. And I had a student at that time who published a paper on understanding coral reefs as complex systems. And we try to use this knowledge and continue to try to use it in the effort on coral restoration. So this is a paper published in the Journal Ocean and Coastal Management. So these are other aspects of our work, the effects of light on coral photosynthesis. So we use laboratory setups like incubation chambers where we can control water temperature and light, for example. And this is called effects of water motion on coral photosynthesis and respiration. So we're also looking, or we were looking at, the effects of strong water movement on the photosynthesis of coral. And this is a master's thesis of Rex Montabon. You can see it was quite a while ago, 1995. And I had a PhD student whom I was supervising together with Professor Coke Montagno at UPMSI. And he finished a PhD dissertation looking at the effects of natural gas condensate on coral. The natural gas is a product of the Malampaya Natural Gas Project in Palawan by Shell Oil Company. And they contracted our group to look at the possible effects of pollution on coral reefs. And we asked Ronald Villanueva to do a PhD dissertation on that. So we have been expanding this kind of work in different parts of the Philippines and incorporating effects of human impacts. But I guess one of the highlights of this invited presentation is what we did under what is called the Emerging Interdisciplinary Research Initiative of Professor Giselle Concepcion when she was Vice President for Academic Affairs of the UP system. So we called the initiative One Ecosystem because we want to look at different habitats because you cannot protect the ocean unless you address problems on the land. So you need an integrated approach which I call One Ecosystem. So for this program, we have collaborators from Physics, Dr. John Bantang and his students from the College of Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, Dr. Prost Naval and his students, the School of Urban and Regional Planning in the person of Dr. David Yap. And we had a German student from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and we have Marie-Court Soriano from Physics as well. Most of them are from UP Dilliman. So the study area is Abra de Ilog in Occidental Mindoro. It's located on the Verde Island Passage which is considered one of the centers of biodiversity in the entire planet. So a lot of the coast of northern Mindoro Island looks like this. You have boulders on the beach that have been carved out of the mountainside and they roll down the mountain slopes and settle on the sand on the beach. But I am posing the hypothesis that some of these boulders, when they are underwater, they can form the substrate for coral. So in this part of Abra de Ilog in Occidental Mindoro, parts of the coral reef are actually very nice which is a sight that you do not see in many parts of the Philippines anymore. So notice also the fish. So that's me 32 years later. So I began diving in 1980 and I continue to dive still. Okay. And this is a research of Professor Marikor Sariano of Physics. She joined our research effort and did a survey of the northern Mindoro coast using an underwater video technology that she invented. And here is an example of her product which is a picture of the coral reef underwater which can then be analyzed in the laboratory for coral cover and the extent of damage and things like that. So this research we're doing actually right now which is a continuation of the EID are funded by Dr. Concepcion includes habitats like river systems and that river system you can still drink the water. So how many rivers in the Philippines if not the whole world are still like that? And Abra de Ilog is also an important rice growing region in the Philippines so we integrate rice farming also into our research considerations and look at the mountain ranges in the background so it's really a beautiful area. Coconut is another important industry for cobra. Okay. So it was Adrian Wagner who took this picture but unfortunately the island of Mindoro is still covered with communities that are very poor. Okay. So this is a Mangyan village somewhere in the mountains extreme poverty is still something that you witness extreme poverty also in the coastal area. Okay. So in this picture you see on the left side the river which is carrying sediment from the upland and then on the right side you see the open sea so the river discharges sediment into the open sea and in this picture you actually see eroded hillsides which is where the soil comes from and Adrian Wagner the German student studied sources of soil erosion and he looked at soil quality and here's an example of a publication from his master's work which he did in collaboration with Dr. David Yap and myself and it's called Drivers and Consequences of Land Use Patterns in a Developing Country Rural Community published in the Journal Agriculture Ecosystems and the Environment in 2015. This is a result of collaboration with Dr. John Bontang of Physics UP Dilliman and a master's student Jen Jen Manuel and they were looking at the river network in Abra de Elog and what Jen Jen Manuel did was she resolved the different nodes in that river network into different types of land use like agriculture other woodland actually she also examined human use like built up areas for commercial purposes for fish ponds and her work was to look at the input of these different activities into the coast how these different activities cause stress on the coast so this was her master's thesis at the National Institute of Physics another student of Dr. John Bontang at Physics looked at livelihood networks in Abra de Elog and if you could take a look at the picture closely we were looking at agricultural activities like rice, cobra we were looking at fishing which included things like squid we were looking at other economic activities like buy and sell, sari sari also charcoal making also mining of pebbles so all of these are examples of livelihood in that study area and we wanted to see how they are interlinked because the whole point is of this research program which I should have mentioned in the beginning is to preserve the natural environment all of those habitats the mountain ecosystem the forest, the rivers all the way to the coral reef on the coast how can we preserve them while maintaining a profile of livelihood activities for the rural population to ensure an acceptable quality of life so what livelihoods can we recommend or develop to help their economic well-being but at the same time preserve the natural environment this is a manuscript that is under review in a journal right now which is a collaboration with Prof. Naval of the Department of Computer Science of the College of Engineering and Alfonso Labau who actually has a degree in economics and looking at how to induce the rural population to adopt certain types of livelihood through provision of equipment assets and this is an example of one of the results of that paper so this is a bit of a technical figure where we look at how we can promote resilience of rural populations through livelihood switching and in this particular example as Alfonso Labau words it the predicted conditional probabilities of households to choose certain types of livelihood given varying levels of rice and fishing equipment with copper equipment fixed it's very technical but in this figure we are able to demonstrate that when rural folk are given equipment for agriculture so that they can pursue livelihood in agriculture they will decrease their fishing effort and the rationale of this particular exercise is we want to convince fishermen to reduce their fishing if the coral reef is already very stressed and overfished so how can we convince them to switch to other forms of livelihood away from the ocean so this is just an example of our work okay this is the last slide actually our research program in the UP is now in close collaboration with an NGO an international NGO based in Paris called Ecotone Resilience and the significance of this is Ecotone Resilience is people by individuals with different fields of expertise including the natural sciences organic agriculture forestry chemical engineering and importantly international impact investment because some of our collaborators from Ecotone Resilience used to work in Wall Street in Manhattan, New York and they are using their expertise in international finance to try to see how they can convince big investors to commit funds to environmental protection and helping people poor people in their livelihood so instead of the traditional big profits that investment has been seeking it seems that there is a shift now in paradigm towards a real valuation of nature and how nature nurtures people so Ecotone Resilience in partnership with the University of the Philippines is looking at this new paradigm of how to bring in international investment to protect nature and help people especially in the poor rural areas and the Memorandum of Understanding was signed by President Alfredo Pasqual last year so it's based in Paris and in conclusion I'd like to express heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to Professor Giselle Concepcion who initiated this program when she was Vice President for Academic Affairs of the UP system