Yvan Simard

Dr. Yvan Simard joined the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in 1986 as a research scientist on crustaceans and hydroacoustics. He headed the Invertebrate and Marine Plants section for one year before going back to research to exploit hydroacoustics and oceanographic methods to study the functioning of the ecosystem within the Fisheries Oceanography section. He has been chairing the Fisheries Acoustics, Science and Technology group of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea; he is member of the Acoustical Society of America, Québec-Ocean and Arctic Net NCE research networks, and he holds the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Chair in marine acoustics applied to ecosystem research at ISMER-UQAR since 2001.

Dr. Simard is a krill specialist and he has been working on the ecology of this whales' forage species and the ocean processes responsible, at various time and space scales, for the formation and maintenance of krill and forage fish aggregations. He has been conducting, and still does, such research on marine ecosystem structures in Canadian eastern, northern and western oceans, using hydroacoustic, oceanographic and geostatistical methods, in collaboration with ocean modellers, including R&D research for data acquisition and processing tools. Since 1998, his research includes the emerging passive acoustic methods to study the ecology of the elusive marine mammals from their calls, which he and his team are working on to automatically detect, identify and localise whales, to map their use and frequentation of the sensible habitats in continue over long periods. The problematic of noise and marine mammals is another research theme.