About
David Hyrenbach was born in Spain, earned a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Scripps Institution in 2001, and moved to O’ahu in 2008.
David has been an Oikonos research associate since 2001, and is a professor of oceanography at Hawai'i Pacific University.
David’s research examines how oceanographic variability shapes the distributions of marine vertebrates, and how habitat preferences influence the efficacy of spatially-explicit management strategies. He has pursued these questions by developing the conceptual foundation for pelagic marine protected areas (MPAs), assessing the overlap of seabirds with fisheries, and quantifying the habitats of far-ranging species.
Since coming to Hawaii, David has been using marine predators as biological indicators of plastic pollution in marine food webs. Students in the pelagicos lab work on a variety of research topics, involving the distribution, foraging ecology, diet, and plastic ingestion by seabirds in relation to oceanographic variability. More recently, the lab has been studying the diet and plastic ingestion by commercially-valuable predatory fishes, like skipjack tuna and mahi-mahi, and their prey.
Since 2009, the lab has been monitoring Wedge-tailed Shearwaters nesting at the Freeman Seabird Preserve in O'ahu (Hawai'i) and studying their attraction and grounding due to artificial lights. During the 2022 breeding season, we started tracking their winter migration across the North Pacific.
To learn more, check out:
David's publications
David's presentations
Featured by Vice News - April 7, 2017
News piece on CNN - March 11, 2013
Joined
July 2016
