Connectivity, persistence, and loss of high abundance areas of a recovering marine fish population in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean
| Autor: | Stephanie A. Boudreau, Stuart Carson, Nancy L. Shackell, Cornelia E. den Heyer |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
habitat protection Fishing Population Halibut 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Gadus persistent areas of abundance R‐INLA spatiotemporal analysis education fisheries recruitment Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics Nature and Landscape Conservation Original Research education.field_of_study Ecology Overfishing biology 010604 marine biology & hydrobiology Northwest Atlantic Ocean Hippoglossus hippoglossus biology.organism_classification commercial fisheries Fishery Geography Groundfish Atlantic halibut Fisheries management |
| Zdroj: | Ecology and Evolution |
| ISSN: | 2045-7758 |
| Popis: | In the early 1990s, the Northwest Atlantic Ocean underwent a fisheries‐driven ecosystem shift. Today, the iconic cod (Gadus morhua) remains at low levels, while Atlantic halibut (Hippoglossus hippoglossus) has been increasing since the mid‐2000s, concomitant with increasing interest from the fishing industry. Currently, our knowledge about halibut ecology is limited, and the lack of recovery in other collapsed groundfish populations has highlighted the danger of overfishing local concentrations. Here, we apply a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal approach to model the spatial structure of juvenile Atlantic halibut over 36 years and three fisheries management regimes using three model parameters to characterize the resulting spatiotemporal abundance structure: persistence (similarity of spatial structure over time), connectivity (coherence of temporal pattern over space), and spatial variance (variation across the seascape). Two areas of high juvenile abundance persisted through three decades whereas two in the northeast are now diminished, despite the increased abundance and landings throughout the management units. The persistent areas overlap with full and seasonal area closures, which may act as refuges from fishing. Connectivity was estimated to be 250 km, an order of magnitude less than the distance assumed by the definition of the Canadian management units (~2,000 km). The underlying question of whether there are distinct populations within the southern stock unit cannot be answered with this model, but the smaller ~250 km scale of coherent temporal patterns suggests more complex population structure than previously thought, which should be taken into consideration by fishery management. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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