Dr. Pierre-Denis Plisnier 

Monitoring Programme Coordinator, ACARE

Dr. Pierre-Denis Plisnier is IISD-ACARE's Monitoring Programme Coordinator. He will be coordinating the development of a long-term monitoring plan for the African Great Lakes.

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Pierre-Denis has 37 years of limnological and fisheries research experience in African aquatic ecosystems, mainly on Lake Tanganyika, including various African lakes and the Congo River, along which he was born. He lived more than 12 years in Africa.

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Pierre-Denis earned his Agronomy Engineer diploma in the field of water and forestry (1984) and Ph.D (1990)  from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium based on three years of fisheries and ecological monitoring of Haplochromines fish species at Lake Muhazi and Ihema in Rwanda. He has taught limnology in the frame of the Nyanza project on tropical lakes at the Tanzanian Fisheries Research Institute, Kigoma, Tanzania through a University of Arizona project funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Pierre-Denis has a rich history in Africa and vast experience including:

• Four years leading the limnological component of the Food and Agriculture Organization's Lake Tanganyika Research project that involved, for the first time, the four riparian countries.

• Senior researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, initiated and coordinated various multidisciplinary research projects, including:

  • ​The El Nino-Southern Oscillation project;

  • Climate Variability as Recorded in Lake Tanganyika project;

  • Fisheries Vulnerability to Climate Change project;

  • Cholera Outbreaks at Lake Tanganyika induced by Climate Change;

  • Implementation of a limnological survey of 50 crater lakes in Uganda for the Climatic and Anthropogenic Impacts on African Ecosystems (CLANIMAE) project.

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Pierre-Denis has also carried out various other missions, including for United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in Senegal as regional coordinator of a climate change adaptation project involving five countries. He was a consultant for the development of a long-term monitoring plan for the Lake Tanganyika Authority conducting an institutional needs assessment and preparation of the long term monitoring of Lake Tanganyika in Burundi, DR Congo, Tanzania and Zambia.

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Pierre-Denis has also had experience as a consultant with various international organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the international consulting group COWI, among others.

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His research has been published in 41 scientific refereed publications in addition to conference proceedings, book chapters and various technical reports.

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​The monitoring experience of Pierre-Denis on African lakes in the frame of international multidisciplinary research projects will be useful for the proposed long-term monitoring of the African Great Lakes by ACARE-IISD.