The capelin is a dominant forage fish in the Barents Sea and is also harvested commercially. With its short life cycle, death after one spawning and a fishery targeting only maturing fish close to spawning, it is a challenging stock to manage and assess. The only abundance estimate used for stock assessment is from September—6 months prior to spawning, and a reliable survey closer to the time of the spawning could therefore im...

Forecasting the number of individuals entering a fishery is critical for sustainable harvest and thereby management actions, but it remains challenging due to the considerable inter‐annual variability and the complex nature of causal factors. This long‐standing ‘recruitment problem’ has become even more urgent under ongoing climate change and the associated regime shifts overturning traditional predictive models. Leveraging th...

Marine capture fisheries play crucial roles in global aquatic protein supply and livelihoods of millions of people. Anthropogenic climate change comes as an overlying threat, potentially necessitating substantial adjustments of harvest control rules or rebuilding plans, especially for species (stocks) that are naturally adapted to restricted environmental fluctuations. Stock productivity, defined as surplus production provided...

Climate change continues to exert pressure on ocean ecosystems. The fisheries‐related responses, such as altered body growth, recruitment and spatial distribution of the targeted stock(s), have generally been reasonably well investigated. Nevertheless, there are still important knowledge gaps in how biophysical drivers impact stock productivity and thereby sustainable harvest levels. Considering this, we investigated 26 fish s...

Methods to reliably identify jump discontinuities in biological time series and to assess the specific contribution of various covariates are rapidly progressing. Here, we took advantage of these statistical improvements as well as those seen in complementary, down‐scaled climate and biogeochemical models to investigate causes of the substantial interannual variability observed in recruitment strength in hindcast analyses. Thi...

The reproductive success of marine ectotherms is especially vulnerable in warming oceans due to alterations in adult physiology, as well as embryonic and larval survival prospects. These vital responses may, however, differ considerably across the species' geographical distribution. Here we investigated the life history, focusing on reproductive ecology, of three spatially distant populations (stocks) of Atlantic cod ( Gadus m...

Impacts of climate change on ocean productivity sustaining world fisheries are predominantly negative but vary greatly among regions. We assessed how 39 fisheries resources—ranging from data‐poor to data‐rich stocks—in the North East Atlantic are most likely affected under the intermediate climate emission scenario RCP4.5 towards 2050. This region is one of the most productive waters in the world but subjected to pronounced cl...

The increasing need to account for the many factors that influence fish population dynamics, particularly those external to the population, has led to repeated calls for an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAFM). Yet systematically and clearly addressing these factors, and hence implementing EAFM, has suffered from a lack of clear operational guidance. Here, we propose 13 main factors (shift in location, migration r...

Fish stock productivity, and thereby sensitivity to harvesting, depends on physical (e.g. ocean climate) and biological (e.g. prey availability, competition and predation) processes in the ecosystem. The combined impacts of such ecosystem processes and fisheries have lead to stock collapses across the world. While traditional fisheries management focuses on harvest rates and stock biomass, incorporating the impacts of such eco...

Assessment of open‐ocean ecosystems relies on understanding ecosystem dynamics, and development of end‐to‐end ecosystem models represents an approach that addresses these challenges. These models incorporate the population structure and dynamics of marine organisms at all trophic levels. Satellite remote sensing of ocean colour and direct at‐sea measurements provide information on the lower trophic levels of the models, and fi...