Recruitment and Production of Commercial Species in Estuaries

The influence of an extreme drought event in the fish community of a southern Europe temperate estuary

“…When comparing with other European estuarine systems (e.g. Laffaille et al, 2000;Cabral et al, 2001;Gordo and Cabral, 2001;Potter et al, 2001;Costa et al, 2002;Hampel et al, 2003;Malavasi et al, 2004), the main difference that can be found is the absence of Mugilidae as one of the most important families. Beam trawling is often considered a suitable method for sampling benthic species, but tends to underestimate pelagic species (Thiel et al, 2003) such as mugilids.…”

Estuarine production of resident and nursery fish species: Conditioning by drought events?

“…Fish populations are very dynamic due to fluctuating levels of recruitment and migration (Costa et al, 2002;Cowley and Whitfield, 2002;Pombo et al, 2007), which bears problems when trying to estimate their production. In estuaries, several fishes have only an occasional occurrence, while others migrate according to age and hydrological environment (Elliott and Dewailly, 1995;Costa et al, 2002), conditioning a correct assessment of their population dynamics.…”

“…In fish populations, these negative productions have been associated to possible migration and/or size selective mortality and have been accounted for the production estimates (Costa et al, 2002;Pombo et al, 2007). The studied species are supposed to spend their life cycle (resident) or their early life stages (nursery) in the estuary (Elliott and Dewailly, 1995), therefore the negative values were not considered for the annual production estimates evaluation, as these could lead to an underestimation of the estuarine production.…”

“…In estuaries, several fishes have only an occasional occurrence, while others migrate according to age and hydrological environment (Elliott and Dewailly, 1995;Costa et al, 2002), conditioning a correct assessment of their population dynamics. Accurate estimates of fish production are provided with both a short time interval relative to the population dynamics of the fish and with a large population size (Elliott, 2002).…”

The divergent environmental characteristics of permanently-open, seasonally-open and normally-closed estuaries of south-western Australia

“…They are therefore crucial for ensuring the sustainability of a number of marine fisheries in both the northern and southern hemispheres (Pollard, 1981, Kennish, 1990, Whitfield, 1998and Sardiña and Cazorla, 2005. Furthermore, some estuaries contain substantial fisheries that are based on certain marine species and on species that complete their life cycle within estuaries (Lenanton and Potter, 1987, Costa et al, 2002, Jaureguizar et al, 2003, Jung and Houde, 2003and Chuwen et al, 2009). The productivity of estuaries is also exploited by a number of bird species as a means of replenishing their energy reserves as they migrate to and from their breeding grounds (Elliott and McLusky, 2002).…”