Objective
Climate change will impact fisheries resources and challenge managers to develop sustainable exploitation strategies. Knowledge on the impacts of climate on fisheries resources is still fragmentary. RECLAIM will summarize current knowledge, test process understanding, improve predictive capacity and formulate future research hypotheses by examining trophic processes, geographical distributions and essential habitat requirements for marine and shellfish in the NE-Atlantic. A conceptual framework will be developed to distinguish between processes acting on individual (physiology, behaviour), population (predation, competition) and ecosystem (physical habitat qualities, biological productivity, trophic coupling) levels. The framework structures a literature re view to detect gaps in knowledge and, where possible, distinguishes between climate and anthropogenic influences.
A comparative analysis follows quantifying climate variability and changes in distribution and productivity of:
(i) individual species,
(ii) selected fish and shellfish communities, and
(iii) ecosystem structure and functioning.
Target species represent different commercially important resources, ecosystem components (pelagics, demersals), and play key trophic roles (wasp-waist, apex predators) within NE-Atlantic ecosystems. Changes in ecosystem structure and functioning will be analysed from fisheries and scientific survey data including planktonic, benthic and fish production and consumption in relation to climate forcing and fishing. Relevant spatial and temporal scales of climate change and variability will be explored using time series analyses, spatial statistics and coupled 3-D hydrodynamic ecosystem models. Using a variety of approaches, RECLAIM will both hindcast as well as forecast the effects of climate change on the productivity and distribution of fish and shellfish stocks to formulate hypotheses and research needs to be addressed in future EU research.
Fields of science
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesfisheries
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiological behavioural sciencesethologybiological interactions
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2005-SSP-5-A
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