Preventing the collapse of the Baltic cod stock through an ecosystem-based management approach

Lindegren, Martin; Möllmann, Christian; Nielsen, Anders; Stenseth, Nils Chr.

doi:10.1073/pnas.0906620106

Cited by 121 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…The first tool is to develop early warning indicators of changing stock productivity and incorporate that knowledge into management systems so that fishing rates can be adjusted (8,19). The performance of this approach has been mixed, with a few successes when processes were well-known and management Time trends of population biomass and fishing rate (Left) before and after population collapse and (Right) before and after minimum biomass for populations that did not collapse.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fishing amplifies forage fish population collapses

Essington¹,

Moriarty²,

Froehlich³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

226

187

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Forage fish support the largest fisheries in the world but also play key roles in marine food webs by transferring energy from plankton to upper trophic-level predators, such as large fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Fishing can, thereby, have far reaching consequences on marine food webs unless safeguards are in place to avoid depleting forage fish to dangerously low levels, where dependent predators are most vulnerable. However, disentangling the contributions of fishing vs. natural processes on population dynamics has been difficult because of the sensitivity of these stocks to environmental conditions. Here, we overcome this difficulty by collating population time series for forage fish populations that account for nearly two-thirds of global catch of forage fish to identify the fingerprint of fisheries on their population dynamics. Forage fish population collapses shared a set of common and unique characteristics: high fishing pressure for several years before collapse, a sharp drop in natural population productivity, and a lagged response to reduce fishing pressure. Lagged response to natural productivity declines can sharply amplify the magnitude of naturally occurring population fluctuations. Finally, we show that the magnitude and frequency of collapses are greater than expected from natural productivity characteristics and therefore, likely attributed to fishing. The durations of collapses, however, were not different from those expected based on natural productivity shifts. A risk-based management scheme that reduces fishing when populations become scarce would protect forage fish and their predators from collapse with little effect on long-term average catches.marine conservation | population collapse | fisheries | ecosystem-based management

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fishing amplifies forage fish population collapses

Essington¹,

Moriarty²,

Froehlich³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

226

187

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If regulations adapt to changes in fish stock, however, the stability of a fishery can be expected to substantially improve (50). We considered three different types of regulatory goals (Fig.…”

Section: Could Management Interventions Have Prevented the Collapse?mentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical model of the Baltic Sea reveals the importance of social dynamics for ecological regime shifts

Lade

Niiranen

Hentati‐Sundberg

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Regime shifts triggered by human activities and environmental changes have led to significant ecological and socioeconomic consequences in marine and terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Ecological processes and feedbacks associated with regime shifts have received considerable attention, but human individual and collective behavior is rarely treated as an integrated component of such shifts. Here, we used generalized modeling to develop a coupled social-ecological model that integrated rich social and ecological data to investigate the role of social dynamics in the 1980s Baltic Sea cod boom and collapse. We showed that psychological, economic, and regulatory aspects of fisher decision making, in addition to ecological interactions, contributed both to the temporary persistence of the cod boom and to its subsequent collapse. These features of the social-ecological system also would have limited the effectiveness of stronger fishery regulations. Our results provide quantitative, empirical evidence that incorporating social dynamics into models of natural resources is critical for understanding how resources can be managed sustainably. We also show that generalized modeling, which is well-suited to collaborative model development and does not require detailed specification of causal relationships between system variables, can help tackle the complexities involved in creating and analyzing socialecological models.social-ecological systems | fisheries | generalized modeling | human decision making | feedback analysis

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“…Once a threshold is crossed, it becomes disproportionately difficult and expensive to reverse or restore to the previous state (Scheffer et al 2012). Regime shifts in coastal and marine ecosystems are increasingly observed at multiple scales worldwide (Möllmann et al 2015), ranging from the shifts in coral reefs (Hughes 1994) and kelp forests (Steneck et al 2013) in the Caribbean, to the collapse of coastal oceanic fisheries and plankton communities in the North Pacific (Hare and Mantua 2000), the North Sea (Kirby and Beaugrand 2009), the Baltic Sea (Lindegren et al 2009), and the Black Sea (Daskalov et al 2007). Most marine ecosystem regime shifts typically result from complex interactions of multiple drivers; some of which gradually undermine ecosystem resilience (e.g., overfishing), while the others (e.g., acute climate event such as a cyclone or tsunami) give the final impulse for abrupt change (Möllmann and Diekmann 2012;Anthony et al 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

Zhang

2015

Ambio

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Regime shift often results in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the provision of ecosystem services and can therefore have significant impacts on human wellbeing. Understanding regime shifts has profound implications for ecosystem recovery and management. China's coastal ecosystems have experienced substantial deterioration within the past decades, at a scale and speed the world has never seen before. Yet, information about this coastal ecosystem change from a dynamics perspective is quite limited. In this review, I synthesize existing information on coastal ecosystem regime shifts in China and discuss their interactions and cascading effects. The accumulation of regime shifts in China's coastal ecosystems suggests that the desired system resilience has been profoundly eroded, increasing the potential of abrupt shifts to undesirable states at a larger scale, especially given multiple escalating pressures. Policy and management strategies need to incorporate resilience approaches in order to cope with future challenges and avoid major losses in China's coastal ecosystem services.

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Preventing the collapse of the Baltic cod stock through an ecosystem-based management approach

Cited by 121 publications

References 44 publications

Fishing amplifies forage fish population collapses

Fishing amplifies forage fish population collapses

An empirical model of the Baltic Sea reveals the importance of social dynamics for ecological regime shifts

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

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