In a paper published in Science Advances, NOAA Fisheries researcher Jason Link and colleague Reg Watson from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies suggest that scientists and resource managers need to focus on whole ecosystems rather than solely on individual populations. Population-by-population fishery management is more common around the world, but a new approach could help avoid damaging overfishing and the insecurity that brings to fishing economies.
“In simple terms, to successfully manage fisheries in an ecosystem, the rate of removal for all fishes combined must be equal to or less than the rate of renewal for all those fish,” said Link, the senior scientist for ecosystem management at NOAA Fisheries and a former fisheries scientist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
The authors suggest using large-scale ecosystem indices as a way to determine when ecosystem overfishing is occurring. They propose three indices, each based on widely available catch and satellite data, to link fisheries landings to primary production and energy transfer up the marine food chain. Specific thresholds developed for each index make it possible, they say, to determine if ecosystem overfishing is occurring. By their definition, ecosystem overfishing occurs when the total catch of all fish is declining, the total catch rate or fishing effort required to get that catch is also declining, and the total landings relative to the production in that ecosystem exceed suitable limits.
“Detecting overfishing at an ecosystem level will help to avoid many of the impacts we have seen when managing fished species on a population-by-population basis, and holds promise for detecting major shifts in ecosystem and fisheries productivity much more quickly,” said Link.
The researchers looked at 64 large marine ecosystems around the world and found those in the tropics, especially in Southeast Asia, have the highest proportion of ecosystem overfishing. Temperate regions also have a high level of ecosystem overfishing, with limited capability to absorb shifting fishing pressure from the tropics as species move toward the poles.
“Even if tropically-oriented fleets were able to shift latitudes and cross claims for marine exclusive economic zones, it remains unclear if temperate regions could absorb shifts from the tropics, given that many temperate regions are also experiencing ecosystem overfishing and catches there have been flat for more than 30 years,” Link said.
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