This study investigates the implications of spatial management strategies on fish populations and fisheries across EU waters, particularly focusing on establishing potential areas for fishing closures to protect nurseries, benthic communities, and biodiversity hotspots in the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. The research addresses the effectiveness of prohibiting certain fishing practices in the context of the EU Comm...

Climate change continues to alter the productivity of commercially and culturally important fisheries with major consequences for food security and coastal economies. We provide the first, multi‐model projections of changes in the distribution and productivity of 18 key fish stocks across seven European regional seas spanning the Mediterranean to the Arctic, using 11 state‐of‐the‐art bio‐ecological models. Our projections indi...

Blue shark ( Prionace glauca ) is amongst the most abundant shark species in international trade, however this highly migratory species has little effective management and the need for spatio-temporal strategies increases, possibly involving the most vulnerable stage or sex classes. We combined 265,595 blue shark observations (capture or satellite tag) with environmental data to present the first global-scale analysis of speci...

Climate change is anticipated to have long-term and widespread direct consequences for the European marine ecosystems and subsequently for the European fishery sector. Additionally, many socio-economic and political factors linked to climate change scenarios will impact the future development of fishing industries. Robust projection modeling of bioeconomic consequences of climate change on the European fishing sector must iden...

The Mediterranean Large Elasmobranchs Monitoring (MEDLEM) database contains over 3000 records (more than 4000 individuals) of large elasmobranch species from 20 different countries around the Mediterranean and Black seas, observed from 1666 to 2017. The main species included in the archive are the devil fish (1 813 individuals), the basking shark (939 individuals), the blue shark (585 individuals) and the great white shark (33...

Since the first introduction of the landing obligation (a.k.a. Discard ban) in 2015, the EU Mediterranean fisheries are facing some unforeseen challenges. The demersal bottom trawl fisheries, being the most significant contributors to the so-called 'discard problem', are confronted with the greatest challenges. Data from the Italian and the Greek fleet, spanning over two decades (1995–2015), were analysed with the intention of...

Summary World food production has increased substantially in the past century, thanks mostly to the increase in the use of oil as input in the production processes. This growing use of fossil fuels has negative effects, both on the environment and the production costs. Fishing is a fuel consuming food production activity, and its energy efficiency performance has worsened over time. World‐wide fisheries are also suffering from...

Generalized additive models (GAMs) were applied to investigate the influence of spatial (subarea), temporal (season) and environmental variables (substrate characteristics, depth, temperature and salinity) on the relative abundance of 27 demersal species of commercial importance in the Aegean Sea. Twelve species exhibited decreasing population density with increasing depth, whereas the abundance of the remaining species peaked...