Research Document - 2001/076

Monitoring Pelagic Marine Cold Water Ecosystems

By Anderson, J.T.

Abstract

Fisheries management traditionally has been based on a single stock approach. More recently, a holistic approach to management and decision making has been called for in the marine environment. Issues such as groundfish stock collapse and lack of recovery, trawl impacts on benthic habitats, marine biodiversity and climate change require an ecosystem approach. Defining marine ecosystems and determining which components should be monitored in long term observational programs (LTOP) is an important starting point for fisheries science. Spatially, marine ecosystems occur at large scales of biomes and provinces with smaller scale structure embedded within. Vertically, the pelagos and benthos vary independently across these marine spatial scales. Monitoring such systems will require carefully planned programs capable of detecting important signals of change. One of these signals is the annual production of fish which occur as pelagic juveniles for a relatively short period of time each year. Measuring the production of fish at the pelagic juvenile stage is an important step towards untangling confounding relationships in traditional fisheries recruitment data.

Complete document (PDF, 562 KB)

Accessibility Notice

This document is available in PDF format. If the document is not accessible to you, please contact the Secretariat to obtain another appropriate format, such as regular print, large print, Braille or audio version.