Dr. Max Troell is a researcher at the Beijer Institute and co-theme leader of Governance and ecosystem management of coastal and marine systems at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He is a system ecologist mainly working with environmental problems associated with aquaculture. This work focuses on inter-linkages between aquaculture and fisheries, on different spatial scales.
Practical fieldwork has mainly been conducted in developing countries (both tropical and temperate) and involved coastal systems as well as freshwater systems. Dr. Troell is currently doing work in India and Cambodia, where he studies how aquacultures allocation of low valued fish resources affect poor peoples ability to access cheep fish. In India he studies coastal fishery resources and coastal communities, and in Cambodia the Mekong fishery and rural inland communities (Sida Project).
A further area of interest is developing integrated cultivation techniques. This work started with coastal open-water aquaculture in Chile, and at present he is involved in works on land-based abalone farms in South Africa (Sida Project). The systems he tries to develop build on using seaweeds as biofilters, with the ultimate aim to increase environmental and economic performance.
A key question is what role these systems can play in future development of aquaculture, i.e. considering the challenges we face with limited resources and degrading environments. Also within this concept he has a minor part in a EU project where peri-urban mangroves are evaluated out from their biofiltering capacity. This work has besides studying nutrient dynamics also a component where socio-economic benefits are evaluated (including estimation of ecosystem goods and services generated from the mangroves).
Dr. Troell is also more generally working with ecological and socio- economic evaluation of ecosystem goods and services generated from tropical and temperate coastal systems. The latest work involved identification of goods and services from some Swedish key coastal habitats, and how to value these (SEEPA).
He has since 1991 been teaching and acting as course leader for marine and freshwater ecology courses. He has regular and occasional teaching assignments on various courses (University level teaching; SU, UmeåUniv., SLU, KTH, Södertörn).
He is a course leader for PhD certificate course (Ecology and economic management, 4 cr), given by The Beijer Institute and has taught ecology in a Sida financed teaching and training programme on environment and development issues for university teachers in economics in developing countries.