Driven by climate change, marine biodiversity is undergoing a phase of rapid change that has proven to be even faster than changes observed in terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding how these changes in species composition will affect future marine life is crucial for conservation management, especially due to increasing demands for marine natural resources. Here, we analyse predictions of a multiparameter habitat suitability m...

The recent rapid growth in aquaculture production reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization may have inadvertently generated what we denote here as aquaculture over-optimism. An extreme form of this is the notion that we need not worry about sustaining wild fish stocks because we can meet the global need through farming. Here we investigate whether the recent growth in aquaculture production can be maint...

Legal requirement in Europe asks for Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in European seas, including consideration of trophic interactions and minimization of negative impacts of fishing on food webs and ecosystem functioning. This study presents the first mass-balanced ecosystem model focused on the western Baltic Sea (WBS). Results show that heavy fishing pressure exerted on the WBS has forced top predators such as h...

Climate change and deoxygenation are affecting fish stocks on a global scale, but disentangling the impacts of these stressors from the effects of overfishing is a challenge. This study was conducted to distinguish between climate change and mismanagement as possible causes for the drastic decline in spawning stock size and reproductive success in cod ( Gadus morhua ) and herring ( Clupea harengus ) in the Western Baltic Sea,...

This study presents a Monte Carlo method ( CMSY ) for estimating fisheries reference points from catch, resilience and qualitative stock status information on data‐limited stocks. It also presents a Bayesian state‐space implementation of the Schaefer production model ( BSM ), fitted to catch and biomass or catch‐per‐unit‐of‐effort ( CPUE ) data. Special emphasis was given to derive informative priors for productivity, unexploi...

Minimizing the impact of fishing is an explicit goal in international agreements as well as in regional directives and national laws. To assist in practical implementation, three simple rules for fisheries management are proposed in this study: 1) take less than nature by ensuring that mortality caused by fishing is less than the natural rate of mortality; 2) maintain population sizes above half of natural abundance, at levels...

The appropriateness of three official fisheries management reference points used in the north‐east A tlantic was investigated: (i) the smallest stock size that is still within safe biological limits ( SSB pa ), (ii) the maximum sustainable rate of exploitation ( F msy ) and (iii) the age at first capture. As for (i), in 45% of the examined stocks, the official value for SSB pa was below the consensus estimates determined from...

The Law of the Sea requires that fish stocks are maintained at levels that can produce the maximum sustainable yield ( MSY ). However, for most fish stocks, no estimates of MSY are currently available. Here, we present a new method for estimating MSY from catch data, resilience of the respective species, and simple assumptions about relative stock sizes at the first and final year of the catch data time series. We compare our...

Maintaining or restoring fish stocks at levels that are capable of producing maximum sustainable yield is a legal obligation under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and has been given the deadline of no later than 2015 in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation of 2002. Here, we analyse stock assessment data of all major fish stocks of the Northeast Atlantic to determine whether Europe will be able t...

Three simple fisheries indicators are presented: (i) percentage of mature fish in catch, with 100% as target; (ii) percent of specimens with optimum length in catch, with 100% as target; and (iii) percentage of ‘mega‐spawners‘ in catch, with 0% as target, and 30–40% as representative of reasonable stock structure if no upper size limit exists. Application of these indicators to stocks of Gadus morhua , Sardinella aurita and Ep...