Title: Senior Scientist
Institution: Center for Coastal Studies
Address: 5 Holway Ave, Provincetown, Massachusetts 02657
Email: dpalacios@coastalstudies.org
Phone: (508) 487-3622
Visit Daniel’s Research Website
Research Interests: Pelagic Ecology, Community Ecology, Management and Conservation of Marine Megafauna, Electronic Tags, Satellite Telemetry, Animal Movement, Climate Impacts on Marine Ecosystems, Ecological Modeling
Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Palacios's background is in oceanography, with a primary focus on understanding the environmental factors that influence the ecology of marine megafauna in pelagic ecosystems. He is currently a Senior Scientist and the Director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachussetts. Between 2013 and 2024, he was part of the professorial faculty at the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute. Prior to that, Dr. Palacios worked for 10 years at NOAA’s Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory as a member of the Tagging of Pelagic Predators (TOPP) program. As part of this program, from 2004 to 2012 he participated in multi-disciplinary projects studying the movements and habitat associations of blue and humpback whales, elephant seals, Hawaiian albatrosses, leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles, and white sharks using electronic tags and remote sensing. His postdoctoral research in 2003-2004 was also at NOAA’s Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory, where he focused on describing interannual-to-decadal variations in the climate of the California Current System. For his 2003 Ph.D. dissertation at Oregon State University he studied the community ecology of cetaceans inhabiting the waters around the Galápagos Islands based on data collected during a year-long expedition to this archipelago in 1993-1994, while working with the Ocean Alliance. His 1994 B.Sc. thesis from Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Colombia was on the population status and breeding ecology of a seabird colony in the Caribbean Sea.