Project description
Accurate predictions of climate change impacts on demersal fish
Future projections suggesting that stocks of demersal fish will decline due to climate change have not been fully validated, limiting their practical use in fisheries management. The EU-funded DemFish project will address this challenge by integrating empirical and theoretical research to assess climate change impacts on demersal fish communities across North Atlantic shelf ecosystems. Statistical models will determine variation in demersal biomass and catches over space and time. A recently developed fish community model will also be validated, improved and used to project changes in demersal fish community biomass and production. This combined approach will provide novel insights into the fish productive capacity of ecosystems and help set new standards for large-scale climate change projections of fish communities.
Objective
Demersal, bottom-living, fish are a globally important marine resource accounting for 35% of global fisheries catches. Future projections suggest that demersal fish community biomass will decline in most continental shelves due to climate change. Yet, these predictions have not been validated, neither across marine regions nor with shifting climatic conditions, limiting their practical use in fisheries management. My goal is to therefore integrate empirical and theoretical research and assess climate change impacts on demersal fish communities across North Atlantic shelf ecosystems.
The project has three objectives (i) examine cross-regional variation and temporal change in demersal biomass and fisheries catches (ii) validate and improve a fish community model with the results of objective 1, and (iii) project how demersal fish communities will respond to future changes in temperature and resources.
The project will complement my skills in theoretical modelling with training in the empirical analysis of demersal fish community data. I will be supervised by Prof. Jeremy Collie from Rhode Island University US, who is strongly qualified to supervise a project seeking to bring together these two fields. I will analyze statistical models to determine variation in demersal biomass and catches in space and time. I will validate and improve a recently developed fish community model with the obtained empirical estimates. Lastly, I will use the validated model to project changes in demersal fish community biomass and production. The project is complemented with a secondment with training in fisheries economics to assess the economic impacts of my climate change projections.
The project will move from theory to nature and through time, and this integrative framework will not only provide novel insights in predicting the fish productive capacity of ecosystems, but it will also set new standards on large-scale climate change projections of fish communities.
Fields of science
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesfisheries
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsstatistics and probability
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
2800 Kongens Lyngby
Denmark