Satellite remote sensing for an ecosystem approach to fisheries management

Abstract

Chassot, E., Bonhommeau, S., Reygondeau, G., Nieto, K., Polovina, J. J., Huret, M., Dulvy, N. K., and Demarcq, H. 2011. Satellite remote sensing for an ecosystem approach to fisheries management. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 68: 651–666. Satellite remote sensing (SRS) of the marine environment has become instrumental in ecology for environmental monitoring and impact assessment, and it is a promising tool for conservation issues. In the context of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAFM), global, daily, systematic, high-resolution images obtained from satellites provide a good data source for incorporating habitat considerations into marine fish population dynamics. An overview of the most common SRS datasets available to fishery scientists and state-of-the-art data-processing methods is presented, focusing on recently developed techniques for detecting mesoscale features such as eddies, fronts, filaments, and river plumes of major importance in productivity enhancement and associated fish aggregation. A comprehensive review of remotely sensed data applications in fisheries over the past three decades for investigating the relationships between oceanographic conditions and marine resources is provided, emphasizing how synoptic and information-rich SRS data have become instrumental in ecological analyses at community and ecosystem scales. Finally, SRS data, in conjunction with automated in situ data-acquisition systems, can provide the scientific community with a major source of information for ecosystem modelling, a key tool for implementing an EAFM.

Remote sensing of environmental indicators of potential fish aggregation: An overview

“…Satellite remote sensing has been an important technique in fishery research, management and harvesting, because it provides synoptic ocean measurements for evaluating environmental influences on the abundance and distribution of fish populations and allows ecological analyses at community and ecosystem scales (Chassot et al 2011;Santos 2011;. Satellite images combined with other data can be analyzed to find ocean environmental conditions suitable for fish aggregation.…”

“…Because certain species of commercial and game fish are indigenous to waters of a specific temperature, fishermen can save fuel and ship time by being able to locate areas of higher potential more rapidly (Carr, Broad 2000;Chassot et al 2011;Gordoa, Maso, Voges 2000).…”

“…For instance, wind-induced upwelling in coastal regions brings nutrients to the surface, creating patchy zones of high biological productivity, accompanied by high concentrations of chlorophyll and phytoplankton, which can be detected and monitored by color and temperature sensors on satellites (Balch et al 1992;Chassot et al 2011;Longhurst et al 1995, Montgomery, Wittenberg-Frey, Austin 1986). The waters off Peru and California are good examples, where long term upwelling events influence the abundance of fish over periods of months.…”

“…Primary production decreased with latitude within each EBC, while the extent of the active area was related to the magnitude of off-shore transport. Differences in observed fish catch were also related to differing trophic structure and spatial accessibility (Carr 2001;Chassot et al 2011;Santos 2011).…”

A simple tool for automatic extraction of Moroccan coastal upwelling from Sea Surface Temperature images

“…The Moroccan coastal upwelling is a part of the canary current system, characterized by persistent and variable upwelling all around the year [1], which promote primary productivity and consequently play a major contribution in the fisheries management and also in the study of the oceanic circulation [5] [2].…”