Cláudia Faustino is currently living in
Faro, Portugal, where she graduated in
Marine Biology and Fisheries at the
University of the Algarve in 2000. She has
long been interested in marine mammals and
did her graduation thesis on the
distribution of cetaceans along the
Portuguese continental coast, conducting
visual surveys aboard research vessels as
well as analysing the national stranding
database.
She worked as an observer for the dolphin
free tuna fishery program POPA (Program of
Fisheries Observation in Azores) in 1998 and
2000, where she increased her interest in
the cetaceans - fisheries interaction.
She has also worked with riverine dolphins
in 2000/01 in Projeto Boto - Biology,
Ecology and Conservation of Amazon Aquatic
Mammals, a long term project being carried
out in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development
Reserve, Brazilian Amazon. Th
ere she
conducted daily data collection on the two
river dolphins species present and from this
amazing experience she wrote a scientific paper (Faustino, C. and da Silva, V. M. F.
2006. Seasonal use of Amazon floodplains by
the tucuxi Sotalia fluviatilis
(Gervais 1853), in the Central Amazon,
Brazil. Submitted to LAJAM).
More recently, Cláudia worked as a cetacean
observer for SCANS II project (Small
Cetaceans in the European Atlantic and North
Sea) surveying the North Sea.
Cláudia has good experience when it comes to
work at sea, having worked on different
vessels and environments and identified more
than 15 species of cetaceans in the wild.
