Estuaries are among the planet's most productive yet threatened ecosystems—critical interfaces where rivers, land, and sea converge to sustain biodiversity, fisheries, and human livelihoods. Yet tropical estuaries remain critically under-monitored, particularly in the Global South, where costly, high-tech approaches are often inaccessible to local managers and communities.
This symposium presents a paradigm shift: leveraging otters, apex predators, and umbrella species as living sentinels of estuarine health. Drawing on four decades of continuous research from Brazil's Projeto Lontra, we showcase how the newly developed Otter Health Index (OHI) transforms non-invasive field data into actionable intelligence for municipalities, NGOs, and citizen scientists. The OHI integrates four core dimensions, relative abundance (via spraint frequency), toxicological burden (via scat analysis), habitat connectivity (via GIS), and community perception, into a single, intuitive score (0–40) interpreted through a traffic-light system (green/yellow/red).
This session brings together researchers, conservation practitioners, and policy experts from across the Neotropics, Europe, and West Africa to explore:

• How otter-based monitoring bridges long-term science and on-the-ground decision-making,
• Case studies of the OHI in action, from Brazil's Atlantic Forest to Senegal's coastal wetlands,
• The role of citizen science and eco-volunteering in scaling bioindicator frameworks,
• Policy alignment with SDGs 6, 14, and 15, and how otter data can inform Ramsar site management, Payments for Ecosystem Services, and climate adaptation strategies.

Aligned with CCORE 2026's theme "One Ocean, One Climate: Science, Innovation & Global Cooperation," this symposium highlights how small mammals can drive big change, proving that effective conservation emerges not from distant expertise alone, but from shared knowledge, care, and action across borders.

Prof. Dr. Sergio Pena Neira
Professor of international law and publicpolicy, Universidad Mayor, Chile
Committee of Artificial Intelligence of the International Law Association

International public policy has focused on areas without regulation since the creation of the discipline in the 1960s at the law school of Yale University. The Sea has been of extreme importance due to the main problem related to this area: it is outside sovereignty or jurisdiction, but it must be managed or organize in order to contribute to human development. Governance and other topics have emerged during the last decade. The Sea is of special interest because environmentally, industrially and humanly speaking is one of the few areas of the world still under the process of regulation, particularly the High Seas or Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction. These topics have to be considered in any project on marine renewable energy. More importantly, the evolution of artificial intelligence has been a topic of interest for a large number of areas and one of them is marine renewable energy. Further, international public policies are the cornerstone for ordering the actions or omissions of States, international organizations in a first instance. This symposium will address these issues contributing to the discussion on the governance of the implementation of marine renewable energy.

Dr. Vishnu D. Rajput
Southern Federal University, Russia