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Andrello, M., Guilhaumon, F., Albouy, C., Parravicini, V., Scholtens, J., Verley, P., et al. (2017). Global mismatch between fishing dependency and larval supply from marine reserves. Nat. Commun., 8, 16039.
Résumé: Marine reserves are viewed as flagship tools to protect exploited species and to contribute to the effective management of coastal fisheries. Yet, the extent to which marine reserves are globally interconnected and able to effectively seed areas, where fisheries are most critical for food and livelihood security is largely unknown. Using a hydrodynamic model of larval dispersal, we predict that most marine reserves are not interconnected by currents and that their potential benefits to fishing areas are presently limited, since countries with high dependency on coastal fisheries receive very little larval supply from marine reserves. This global mismatch could be reversed, however, by placing new marine reserves in areas sufficiently remote to minimize social and economic costs but sufficiently connected through sea currents to seed the most exploited fisheries and endangered ecosystems.
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Arrizabalaga, H., Dufour, F., Kell, L., Merino, G., Ibaibarriaga, L., Chust, G., et al. (2015). Global habitat preferences of commercially valuable tuna. Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, 113, 102–112.
Résumé: In spite of its pivotal role in future implementations of the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management, current knowledge about tuna habitat preferences remains fragmented and heterogeneous, because it relies mainly on regional or local studies that have used a variety of approaches making them difficult to combine. Therefore in this study we analyse data from six tuna species in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans in order to provide a global, comparative perspective of habitat preferences. These data are longline catch per unit effort from 1958 to2007 for albacore, Atlantic bluefin, southern bluefin, bigeye, yellowfin and skipjack tunas. Both quotient analysis and Generalized Additive Models were used to determine habitat preference with respect to eight biotic and abiotic variables. Results confirmed that, compared to temperate tunas, tropical tunas prefer warm, anoxic, stratified waters. Atlantic and southern bluefin tuna prefer higher concentrations of chlorophyll than the rest. The two species also tolerate most extreme sea surface height anomalies and highest mixed layer depths. In general, Atlantic bluefin tuna tolerates the widest range of environmental conditions. An assessment of the most important variables determining fish habitat is also provided.
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Aubert, A., Antajan, E., Lynam, C., Pitois, S., Pliru, A., Vaz, S., et al. (2018). No more reason for ignoring gelatinous zooplankton in ecosystem assessment and marine management: Concrete cost-effective methodology during routine fishery trawl surveys. Mar. Pol., 89, 100–108.
Résumé: Gelatinous zooplankton, including cnidarians, ctenophores, and tunicates (appendicularians, pyrosomes, salps and doliolids), are often overlooked by scientific studies, ecosystem assessments and at a management level. Despite the important economic consequences that they can have on human activities and on the marine food web, arguments often related to the costs of monitoring or their coordination, or simply negligence, have resulted in the absence of relevant monitoring programs. A cost-effective protocol has been applied on trawling from existing fishery surveys conducted by national laboratories in England and France. The testing phase has successfully demonstrated the adequacy of such a tool to sample macro- and mega-zooplankton gelatinous organisms in a cost-effective way. This success has led to the acceptance of this protocol into the French implementation of the EU's Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). Here, a protocol which can be applied to any trawl-based fishery survey and in any new large-scale monitoring program is provided. As an ecosystem approach to marine management is currently adopted, exemplified by the MSFD in Europe, gelatinous zoo plankton should be monitored correctly to prevent a knowledge gap and bias to ecosystem assessments in future.
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Avadi, A., Adrien, R., Aramayo, V., & Freon, P. (2018). Environmental assessment of the Peruvian industrial hake fishery with LCA. Int. J. Life Cycle Assess., 23(5), 1126–1140.
Résumé: The Peruvian hake (Merluccius gayi peruanus) stock has been in a delicate state in the last decades due to overexploitation combined with adverse climatic events. The stock is showing certain signs of recovery since 2012. This work analyses the environmental impacts of current fleet operations and its likely trend. The fleet was divided into coherent segments, per holding capacity and engine power. The validity of both segmentations, as well as the presence of an effect of economies of scale driving fuel use intensity (FUI), was tested. Life cycle assessment was used to calculate environmental impacts, per individual sampled vessel and per segment, complemented with indicators of energy efficiency and biotic resource depletion. The fleet is highly fuel-efficient (120 kg fuel per tonne fish) when compared with other reported values, despite a large overcapacity that increases the impact of the construction and maintenance phases. Significant inter-annual FUI variations were observed (80.0 kg t(-1) in 2008 to 210.3 kg t(-1) in 2006), but no clear trend. Neither significant differences in FUI among fleet segments nor a clear effect of economies of scale were found (but FUI analysis was based on a small sample of 32 values for nine vessels, two of which had data for a single year). Only the largest vessels, featuring 242 m(3) holding capacity and 850 hp engine power, were found to have lower FUI than any of the other vessels, but no statistical test could be applied to validate this difference. Differences in environmental impacts of individual vessels are mostly dominated by their relative FUI. Fuel use and, to a lower extent, maintenance are the main sources of environmental impacts. The most contributing impacts to ReCiPe single score are climate change, human toxicity and fossil depletion. The fishery's impacts on the biotic natural resource were orders of magnitude higher than many other global hake stocks, due to overexploitation. The environmental impacts of the national hake fleet are relatively low during the study period, despite an overcapacity of the fleet. With the perspective of expanding its operations and obtaining better yields on the eventuality that the stock fully recovers, these impacts should decrease. More research based on additional FUI data is necessary to effectively compare the performance of these vessels with larger ones (featuring > 180 m(3) and > 500 hp, of which nine existed in 2016) before possibly recommending their preferential use.
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Ayata, S. - D., Irisson, J. - O., Aubert, A., Berline, L., Dutay, J. - C., Mayot, N., et al. (2018). Regionalisation of the Mediterranean basin, a MERMEX synthesis. Progress in Oceanography, 163, 7–20.
Résumé: Regionalisation aims at delimiting provinces within which physical conditions, chemical properties, and biological communities are reasonably homogeneous. This article proposes a synthesis of the many recent regionalisations of the open-sea regions of the Mediterranean Sea. The nine studies considered here defined regions based on different, and sometimes complementary, criteria: dynamics of surface chlorophyll concentration, ocean currents, three-dimensional hydrological and biogeochemical properties, or the distribution of organisms. Although they identified different numbers and patterns of homogeneous regions, their compilation in the epipelagic zone identifies nine consensus frontiers, eleven consensus regions with relatively homogeneous conditions, and four heterogeneous regions with highly dynamical conditions. The consensus frontiers and regions are in agreement with well-known hydrodynamical features of the Mediterranean Sea, which constrain the distribution of hydrological and ecological variables. The heterogeneous regions are rather defined by intense mesoscale activity. The synthesis proposed here could constitute a reference step for management actions and spatial planning, such as the application of the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and for future biogeochemical and ecological studies in the Mediterranean Sea.
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