Paradinas, I. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2023

Large scale spatio-temporal study on European hake depicts sensitivity to sea bottom temperature, sea bottom oxygen concentration and sea surface temperature.

European hake (Merluccius merluccius) is a commercially important fish species that is known to have a marked bathymetric preference. No other environmental variable has yet been identified to drive the distribution of hake. This study looked into different climatic variables at different depths and identified sea bottom temperature, sea bottom dissolved oxygen concentration and chlorophyll concentration to affect the distribution of both juvenile and adult hake distributions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Designing fisheries restricted areas using standard fishery survey data: a novel multilevel spatio-temporal approach

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a promising management tool for the conservation and recovery of marine ecosystems, as well as fisheries management. MPAs are generally established as permanent closures but marine systems are dynamic, which has generated debate in favour of more dynamic designs. As a consequence, the identification of priority areas should assess their persistence in space and time. Here, we develop a step-by-step approach to assess the spatiotemporal dynamics of fisheries management priority areas using standard fishery-independent survey data. To do so, we fit Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal SDM models to different commercially important demersal species and use the resulting maps to fit different spatial prioritisation configurations. We use these results to assess the spatiotemporal dynamics of fisheries priority areas. The proposed method is illustrated through a western Mediterranean case study using fishery-independent trawl survey data on six commercially important species collected over 17 years. We identified two fisheries priority area patterns in the study area, each predominant during a different time-period of the study, asserting the importance of regularly re-assessing MPA designs.

ecology↗