DemFish · Integrating empirical and modelling research to assess climate change impacts on demersal fish communities
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-07-01 → 2024-06-30
- EU contribution
- €286,922
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Integrating empirical and modelling research to assess climate change impacts on demersal fish communities
How much fish will there be in the future oceans, and how much of these fish can be caught by fisheries? Predicting the future of fish is an important challenge for marine science because marine fisheries are crucial for our global food and livelihood. Scientists have created mathematical models to understand how climate change affects fish worldwide. However, these models are uncertain because we still lack knowledge about how temperature impacts different fish species and communities. In my research, I wanted to verify the model-based predictions with new data of fish biomass from scientific surveys. Specifically, I focused on estimating the number of bottom-living fish such as cod, haddock, and flatfish. These types of fish are important for fisheries and account for 35-50% of all the fish caught globally. Yet, due to climate change, the total amount of these fish is expected to decline in the next few decades. My project had three primary goals. First, I aimed to study the variation in bottom-living fish populations across different ocean regions and identify key factors influencing these numbers, such as temperature and fishing activity. Second, I used a mathematical model to predict the abundance of bottom-living fish and how this has changed with historical fishing. Lastly, I aimed to forecast how bottom-living fish might respond to future changes. I found that temperature is a key driver of total fish biomass variation. This finding is consistent with our theoretical understanding of the effects of temperature on fish community biomass. It implies that demersal fish community biomass is likely to decline with ocean warming. However, trust in future projections also relies on establishing that models can accurately simulate past relationships between exploitation rates and ecosystem states. To this end, I estimated regional fishing exploitation levels from data and used these to globally simulate historical fishing patterns. The results provide capacity for the quantification of future trends in global fish biomass and potential fisheries production.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project 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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- DANMARKS TEKNISKE UNIVERSITET · Kongens LyngbyCoordinatorDenmark
- THE UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND · KingstonUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union