Sustainable Seas began in 2018 as the proposed Fulbright project of the founder, Kim Sawicki. For the first three years, the project was known as Sustainable Seas.
In 2021, the project became the full-time focus of the author of the blog, Kim Sawicki. (PhD research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth)
Our Vision: To promote the use of innovation and technology to advance safe and sustainable harvest of pot and trap caught seafood.
Our Mission: Sustainable Seas shapes the future of sustainable oceans and seas through discovery, understanding, and action. These goals are realized through research in the application of innovative technologies that protect marine species from unnecessary anthropogenic and pathologic causes of death. It is our further goal to share and promote the education and reasonable and appropriate use of these technologies to fishing communities, fisheries management, scientists, and the general public.
The Board of Directors
The Project Founders:
Annika Toth is a German-born artist and marine biologist living and
working in Denmark. She graduated with a Masters in Marine Biology from the University of Southern Denmark and currently works at the Nordsøen Aquarium and in the past has performed extensive research to rebuild the population of endangered European eels.
Annika helped found the Sustainable Seas project in 2018 in an effort to reduce the vast suffering she has seen in many of the marine mammals she has worked with in necropsy; both whales and porpoises which were accidental casualties of fishing gear.
She is an exceptionally talented and award winning artist creating both artistic and technical renderings of the animals we are working to protect as well as the innovations we share with entanglement experts and fishing communities. She is also working on several fundraising projects with her art to aid in research that mitigates these entanglements.
Annika is the creator of numerous technical illustrations of the ropeless fishing gears Sustainable Seas Technology uses in a variety of materials.
Annika is also the designer of the beautiful Sustainable Seas Technology logo.
Kim Sawicki is a Ph.D. student studying conservation engineering at UMASS-Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology. She and Annika founded the Sustainable Seas Project in 2018. In 2020, she then founded the Sustainable Seas Technology 501 (c) (3), charity to continue working with innovative technology, fishers, and engineers to save marine mammals from unnecessary human-induced deaths, to reduce lost gear and ghost gear, and to preserve coastal fishing communities as they are.
She was a funded Fulbright-Schuman Program Alumni affiliated with the University of Connecticut, the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and the Marine Institute in the Republic of Ireland to conduct research on marine policy relating to fisheries management, entanglement, gear technology, and fishing innovations. Her nine-month independent research project in 2018–19 required travel along the coasts of both countries, working closely with entanglement experts, pathologists, engineers, policy makers, and fishing communities.
In addition to her ongoing research, the author fosters informed discussion of coastal community and cetacean conservation through innovation on her website, Sustainable Seas Technology. Since November 2018, she has served as a liaison between ten underwater technology companies and entrepreneurs that have mature products or are actively developing ropeless technologies.
She is recognized as a leading expert of subsea buoy retrieval systems for fishing applications and has extensive experience working one on one with fishers wishing to adopt on-demand fishing technologies.
Sustainable Seas Technology hopes through the various innovations our work seeks to evaluate and promote that we can help reduce bycatch, lost gear, ghost fishing, and marine life entanglements. We also hope to help expand opportunities for fishing communities suffering from these unfortunate impacts of pot and trap fishing.
