Reliable stock assessments are essential for successful and sustainable fisheries management. Advanced stock assessment methods are expensive, as they require age‐ or length‐structured catch and detailed fishery‐independent data, which prevents their widespread use, especially in developing regions. Furthermore, modern fisheries management increasingly includes socio‐economic considerations. Integrated ecological‐economic advi...

Marine social-ecological systems (SES) have been providing important cultural, social, and economic services for many centuries. They are, however, increasingly threatened by fast changing environmental, ecological, and socio-economic conditions. As historical marine research is increasingly developing into a multidisciplinary endeavour, it offers outstanding points of departure to analyse historic events and the response and...

Socio‐economic development has shaped fisheries social‐ecological systems (SES) worldwide across different scales. No work has yet undertaken how this development led to novel, not experienced before, systems structure in marine SES. Here, we quantify socio‐economic novelty as the degree of dissimilarity relative to a specific spatiotemporal baseline in the Baltic Sea fisheries SES between 1975 and 2015. We used catch by "gear...

Marine ecosystems evolve under many interconnected and area‐specific pressures. To fulfil society's intensifying and diversifying needs while ensuring ecologically sustainable development, more effective marine spatial planning and broader‐scope management of marine resources is necessary. Integrated ecological–economic fisheries models ( IEEFM s) of marine systems are needed to evaluate impacts and sustainability of potential...

Four marine fish species are among the most important on the world market: cod, salmon, tuna, and sea bass. While the supply of North American and European markets for two of these species – Atlantic salmon and European sea bass – mainly comes from fish farming, Atlantic cod and tunas are mainly caught from wild stocks. We address the question what will be the status of these wild stocks in the midterm future, in the year 2048...

Plankton sampling was conducted in the Baltic to obtain sprat larvae. Their individual drift patterns were back‐calculated using a hydrodynamic model. The modelled positions along the individual drift trajectories were subsequently used to provide insight into the environmental conditions experienced by the larvae. Autocorrelation analysis revealed that successive otolith increment widths of individual larvae were not independ...

We employed a coupled three‐dimensional biophysical model to explore long‐term inter‐ and intra‐annual variability in the survival of sprat larvae in the Bornholm Basin, a major sprat spawning area in the Baltic Sea. Model scenarios incorporated observed decadal changes in larval diel vertical distribution and climate‐driven abiotic and biotic environmental factors including variability in the abundance of different, key prey...

Otolith microstructure analysis and hydrodynamic modelling were combined to study growth patterns in young‐of‐the‐year (YoY) sprat, Sprattus sprattus , which were sampled in October 2002 in the central Baltic Sea. The observed ‘window of survival’, approximated by the distribution of back‐calculated days of first feeding (DFF), was narrow compared to the extended spawning season of sprat in the Baltic Sea (mean± SD = 22 June ±...