Project description
Fishing for marine ecosystem stability
Climate change and overfishing are without a doubt threatening the future of marine ecosystems, resulting in a reduction of marine populations. The question is how much and for how long. It’s important to track and forecast marine ecosystem stability in order to understand the capacity of an ecosystem to survive disturbances. In this context, supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MAFIS project will develop a novel research framework to track and forecast marine population stability encompassing temporal and spatial dimensions of three key fish species of the North Sea and to identify drivers of population stability across space. The results will be presented in an online interactive map and manual for fisheries managers and researchers.
Objective
Marine ecosystems provide key functions and services including biodiversity and food resources. Disturbances, such as climate change and overfishing, are seriously threatening the future provision of these services and leading to collapse of marine populations. To track and forecast marine ecosystem stability has emerged as a new paradigm to understand the capacity of an ecosystem to persist a qualitatively similar state in the face of disturbances. However, three challenges prevent the advances in this research field. Most established stability measures assume stable equilibrium and constant magnitude of disturbances, while marine ecosystems are influenced by multiple disturbances simultaneously, with the magnitude of disturbances changing with time. In addition, even though population stability varies with space, most of existing work examined marine ecosystem stability at the regional scale of fishing grounds due to limitations in data and methodology. Moreover, age group interactions fundamentally affect population dynamics yet have been overlooked when quantifying population stability. In line with those reflections, this proposed research intends to develop a novel research framework to track and forecast marine population stability encompassing temporal and spatial dimensions of three key fish species of the North Sea (WP1), and to identify drivers of population stability across space (WP2). Empirical dynamic modelling will be used to track and forecast the evolution of population stability over time and across space based on age group interactions of the population, producing yearly population stability maps from 1977 to 2022 and forecast maps from 2023 onward. These results will be transformed into web-based interactive map and manual (WP3) for fisheries managers and researchers to identify the most vulnerable locations in the fishing grounds and to decide fishing quota with the overall goal of preserving stability in marine ecosystems.
Fields of science
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesfisheries
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographycartography
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyichthyology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
75794 Paris
France