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- Title
Improved management of small pelagic fisheries through seasonal climate prediction.
- Authors
Tommasi, Désirée; Stock, Charles A.; Pegion, Kathleen; Vecchi, Gabriel A.; Methot, Richard D.; Alexander, Michael A.; Checkley, David M.
- Abstract
Populations of small pelagic fish are strongly influenced by climate. The inability of managers to anticipate environment-driven fluctuations in stock productivity or distribution can lead to overfishing and stock collapses, inflexible management regulations inducing shifts in the functional response to human predators, lost opportunities to harvest populations, bankruptcies in the fishing industry, and loss of resilience in the human food supply. Recent advances in dynamical global climate prediction systems allow for sea surface temperature ( SST) anomaly predictions at a seasonal scale over many shelf ecosystems. Here we assess the utility of SST predictions at this 'fishery relevant' scale to inform management, using Pacific sardine as a case study. The value of SST anomaly predictions to management was quantified under four harvest guidelines ( HGs) differing in their level of integration of SST data and predictions. The HG that incorporated stock biomass forecasts informed by skillful SST predictions led to increases in stock biomass and yield, and reductions in the probability of yield and biomass falling below socioeconomic or ecologically acceptable levels. However, to mitigate the risk of collapse in the event of an erroneous forecast, it was important to combine such forecast-informed harvest controls with additional harvest restrictions at low biomass.
- Subjects
FISHERY management; LONG-range weather forecasting; ECOSYSTEM management; FORAGE fishes; SARDINOPS sagax
- Publication
Ecological Applications, 2017, Vol 27, Issue 2, p378
- ISSN
1051-0761
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/eap.1458