A very interesting and highly valuable collaboration for marine research has been ongoing for the past four years between Terengganu University in Malaysia and the Archipelagos Institute.
This autumn, Terengganu University students Mohamad Amirul Bin Jamaluddin and Muhammad Aidil Haikal bin Biamin received a scholarship from Archipelagos Institute and are actively participating in research at Archipelagos’ Marine Systems Monitoring Laboratory.
In the coming months, our collaboration will continue with exchanges of staff and expertise, both from Archipelagos Institute to the South China Sea, as well as with the hosting of scientists from Terengganu University in the Aegean, as has also taken place in previous years.
It is important to highlight that Malaysian universities, such as Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), are state-of-the-art institutions that in many fields compete with—and often surpass—universities in Europe and the USA. At Archipelagos Institute, we learn a great deal from the highly specialized research they conduct on the monitoring of marine ecosystems and the tackling of marine pollution.
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Our collaboration began in 2021 under the Eco-Marine initiative, through which 4 new Marine Monitoring Labs were established in Malaysia and India. Archipelagos Institute played a key role in the creation of these labs, sharing the knowledge and experience developed over the past 27 years:
expertise in the construction and operation of field laboratories
development and application of low-cost, high-accuracy scientific research protocols
The new Marine Monitoring Labs—along with the laboratories of Archipelagos Institute, Oviedo University, and the University of Cyprus—now operate under common research protocols, focusing on the monitoring of productive marine ecosystems, assessing the impacts of climate change, and evaluating the extent of plastic pollution in ecologically important marine regions of the South China Sea, the northern Indian Ocean, and parts of the Mediterranean.
As the problems and pressures threatening our seas and oceans are shared across the globe, it is vital that we make use of every experience and piece of knowledge that can contribute to addressing the increasing human impact on marine ecosystems.
