Strategies for Multispecies Management

Associations between fish assemblages and environmental factors in nearshore habitats of a subtropical estuary

“…Many of the stock-assessment models in use today rely heavily on fishery-dependent landings or CPUE data (Beverton & Holt, 1957;Hilborn & Walters, 1992), but further improvements in resolution and predictability could be made by the additional inclusion of fisheries-independent data (National Research Council, 1998). The numerous methods used currently to model fish abundance from fisheries-independent data can be divided approximately into those based on biological processes, such as multispecies models (Larkin et al, 1984;Sissenwine & Daan, 1991), and those relying on physical environmental variables (Serchuk et al, 1994). Consequently, knowledge about the relative importance of the biological and environmental influences upon fish assemblages in estuaries is a crucial consideration in choosing the most accurate and precise estimates of single species stocks.…”

Is fishing-down trophic web a generalized phenomenon?

“…For example, they present a higher trophic level when compared with fish of the same size living in a temperate environment (Pauly, 1998). Considering this and that fisheries in temperate zones are to a greater extent mono-specific, their food webs are relatively simple (Larkin et al, 1984) and their management policies cannot be generalized nor applied to tropical fisheries, where food webs are complex and include a high number of interactions, many of which are still unknown (Souter and Lindén, 2000).…”

“…Tropical artisanal fisheries are characteristically multispecific due to the low selectivity of the fishing methods, and the high biodiversity (Larkin et al, 1984). This phenomenon produces a high aggregation of species at the time of producing the official fisheries reports.…”

Ecosystem Approaches for Fisheries Management

“…Although multi species methods for assessing the exploitation status of fisheries have long been recognized as being critically needed (e.g.. Larkin et al 1984), there are as yet no methods that are generally accepted by the fisheries research community. The contributions in Sissenwine and Daan (1991) comprehensively review multispecies methods that showed promise at that time.…”