An ocean observation system for monitoring the affects of climate change on the ecology and sustainability of pelagic fisheries in the Pacific Ocean

Simon Nicol (), Valerie Allain, Graham Pilling, Jeff Polovina, Marta Coll, Johann Bell, Paul Dalzell, Peter Sharples, Robert Olson, Shane Griffiths, Jeffrey Dambacher, Jock Young, Antony Lewis, John Hampton, Jesus Jurado Molina, Simon Hoyle, Karine Briand, Nic Bax, Patrick Lehodey and Peter Williams

Climatic Change, 2013, vol. 119, issue 1, 145 pages

Abstract: Climate change presents an emerging challenge to the sustainable management of tuna fisheries, and robust information is essential to ensure future sustainability. Climate and harvest affect tuna stocks, populations of non-target, dependent species and the ecosystem. To provide relevant advice we need an improved understanding of oceanic ecosystems and better data to parameterise the models that forecast the impacts of climate change. Currently ocean-wide data collection in the Pacific Ocean is primarily restricted to oceanographic data. However, the fisheries observer programs that operate in the region offer an opportunity to collect the additional information on the mid and upper trophic levels of the ecosystem that is necessary to complement this physical data, including time-series of distribution, abundance, size, composition and biological information on target and non-target species and mid trophic level organisms. These observer programs are in their infancy, with limited temporal and spatial distribution but recent international and national policy decisions have been made to expand their coverage. We identify a number of actions to initiate this monitoring including: consolidating collaborations to ensure the use of best quality data; developing consistency between sub-regional observer programmes to ensure that they meet the objectives of ecosystem monitoring; interrogating of existing time series to determine the most appropriate spatial template for monitoring; and exploring existing ecosystem models to identify suitable indicators of ecosystem status and change. The information obtained should improve capacity to develop fisheries management policies that are resilient and can be adapted to climate change. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-012-0598-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:119:y:2013:i:1:p:131-145

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0598-y

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().