Summary
Sustainable fisheries management requires an understanding of the links between environmental conditions and fish stock populations, especially in the context of climate change. However, governments often fall short of explicitly incorporating knowledge of environmental conditions into fishery decision-making processes. Identifying phases where ocean climate fluctuations and changes in ecosystem productivity coincide could provide a powerful tool to help inform fisheries management. For example, setting more conservative extraction targets, or ecosystem quotas, during periods when environmental conditions are deemed less favorable for productivity is an easy and immediately applicable solution. Conversely, in periods of more favorable conditions strict conservation efforts might be relaxed. Using 70 years of climactic data from the Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) ecosystem and the northwest Atlantic as a whole, we document a series of turning points in the environment that also correspond to shifts in ecosystem productivity from primary producers to piscivorous fish. We provide a framework for incorporating environmental conditions into fisheries management on the NL shelf, that can be applied to other regions and ecosystems facing similar challenges.
Brief biography
Dr. Frédéric Cyr is a multi-disciplinary physical oceanographer with strong research interests in physical-biogeochemical interactions, ocean climate and fisheries. He works as a research scientist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), based at the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He holds a B. Eng. degree in Engineering Physics (Montreal Polytechnic, Canada, 2008), a MSc in Climate Sciences (UVSQ, France, 2008) and a PhD in Oceanography (ISMER-UQAR, Canada, 2014). After postdocs in the Netherlands (NIOZ) and France (MIO-AMU), where he explored topics as broad as Turbulent Mixing and Ocean Chemistry, he joined DFO in 2017 and now mainly focuses on the Northwest Atlantic ocean climate. His research activities are strongly related to DFO’s Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program (AZMP) which aims to provide environmental considerations in support of fisheries sciences and management.