Small pelagic fish (SPF) are critical to the trophodynamic structure and function of marine systems and support some of the most valuable and socially important fisheries worldwide. Their “boom and bust” population dynamics, shifts in distribution, and importance as forage resources for other fish stocks place unique challenges to assessing and managing SPF. In response to these challenges, an international working group was f...

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...

Energy content has long been proposed as a fundamental, integrated, and reliable indicator of the condition of individuals as it reflects past bioenergetics and influences future life‐history traits. There is a direct biochemical link between energy density and body composition described by four main compounds in fish (protein, lipid, ash, and water), with proteins and lipids being the sources of energy. If relationships betwe...

Fish habitats sustain essential functions for fish to complete their life cycle, such as feeding, growing and spawning. Conservation is crucial to maintain fish populations and their exploitation. Since 2013, the spawning stock biomass of the northern stock of European seabass ( Dicentrarchus labrax ) has been in a worrying state. A series of low recruitments with a persistently high level of fishing has been blamed, raising c...

Age and size at maturation appear as key parameters governing the dynamics of a population as they affect growth rate, fecundity, and survival. The expression of such life history traits is determined by genetic make-up and modulated by environmental factors mainly through phenotypic plasticity. Moreover, fishing, besides decreasing population size and changing demographic composition can alter allelic frequencies through fish...

To anticipate the response of fish populations to climate change, we developed a framework that integrates requirements in all life stages to assess impacts across the entire life cycle. The framework was applied on plaice ( P leuronectes platessa ) and Atlantic herring ( C lupea harengus ) in the N orth S ea, A tlantic cod ( G adus morhua ) in the N orwegian/ B arents S eas and E uropean anchovy ( E ngraulis encrasicolus ) in...

For many marine fish species, recruitment is strongly related to larval survival and dispersal to nursery areas. Simulating larval drift should help assessing the sensitivity of recruitment variability to early life history. An individual‐based model (IBM) coupled to a hydrodynamic model was used to simulate common sole larval supply from spawning areas to coastal and estuarine nursery grounds at the population scale in the ea...