Gretta Pecl


Gretta T. Pecl is an Australian marine ecologist and Director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the University of Tasmania. She is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and on the Editorial Board of Springer Nature's Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries.

Early life and education

Pecl is from Tasmania. She earned her bachelor's degree at James Cook University in 1994. She completed an undergraduate dissertation on Idiosepius pygmaeus. Pecl remained at James Cook University for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in 2000. Her doctoral thesis looked at Sepioteuthis squids on the east coast of Australia. It considered the variation in history of two closely related cephalopod species, namely Sepioteuthis australis and Sepioteuthis lessoniana. Her research continued into a Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tasmania, looking at the movement of Sepioteuthis australis using acoustic location and trace element analysis. Her fellowship looked at the physiological and ecological mechanisms that underpin the redistribution of species through marine systems.

Research and career

Pecl studies the ecology of climate change, in particular, what happens to wildlife in warming oceans. She has primarily investigated the warm water off the coast of Tasmania. Pecl founded the Range Extension Database and Mapping project, a crowdsourced map which collects public sightings of fish. She founded the project after a workshop where fishers started to share information about recent sightings. The project can make people more aware of climate change as they notice repeated changes in their own environments. Photographs are verified by a team of scientists across Australia. Redmap was awarded the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales Whitely Award in 2010.
Pecl was awarded a Fulbright Program scholarship to join the University of Alaska Southeast, looking at how climate change had impacted the red king crab. That year she was named one of the University of Tasmania's "Rising Stars". She has formed an International Global Marine Hotspots Network with national and international colleagues to bridge users and managers of the sea. Pecl studied how the distribution of fresh water and land species that results from climate change has an effect on human wellbeing. She showed how changes in these changes in distribution impact health and culture. The human impact includes tourism and recreational fishing, as well as health threats such as malaria.
Pecl served as editor-in-chief of Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries. She was elected to the Australian Society for Fish Biology Hall of Fame in 2016. She was made Director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the University of Tasmania in 2018. The Centre is a collaboration between with University of Tasmania, the CSIRO and the Australian Antarctic Division.

Notable publications

Pecl has written for The Conversation.

Personal life

Pecl is married with two children.