Fish Population Dynamics Monitoring And Management

This book explores how we can solve the urgent problem of optimizing the use of variable, uncertain but finite fisheries resources while maintaining sustainability from a marine-ecosystem conservation perspective. It offers readers a broad understanding of the current methods and theory for sustainable exploitation of fisheries resources, and introduces recent findings and technological developments. The book is divided into three parts: Part I discusses fish stock dynamics, and illustrates how ecological processes affecting life cycles and biological interactions in marine environments lead to fish stock variability in space and time in major fish groups; small pelagic fish, demersal fish and large predatory fish. These insights shed light on the mechanisms underlying the variability in fish stocks and form the essential biological basis for fisheries management. Part II addresses the technologies and systems that monitor changes in fisheries resources and marine ecosystems using two approaches: fishery-dependent and fishery-independent data. It also describes acoustic surveys and biological sampling, as well as stock assessment methods. Part III examines management models for effectively assessing the natural variability in fisheries resources. The authors explore ways of determining the allowable catch in response to changes in stock abundance and how to incorporate ecological processes and monitoring procedures into management models. This book offers readers a broad understanding of sustainable exploitation as well as insights into fisheries management for the next generation.

This new edition provides updated information on population dynamics of major food fishes, and reviews the various methods used to study quantitative impacts of fishing on fish stocks. Contributors provide an historical background of the subject, then go on to cover current theories and methods of stock assessment, how these theories and methods have been applied in practice, and the effects of fisheries management on fish populations. They discuss length-based methods of stock assessment, multi-species fisheries, and provide data on fish populations in the North Atlantic, the Irish Sea, off Australia, Southeast Asia, and other regions. Completely revised and updated, including several new chapters.

This book serves as an advanced text on fisheries and fishery population dynamics and as a reference for fisheries scientists. It provides a thorough treatment of contemporary topics in quantitative fisheries science and emphasizes the link between biology and theory by explaining the assumptions inherent in the quantitative methods. The analytical methods are accessible to a wide range of biologists, and the book includes numerous examples. The book is unique in covering such advanced topics as optimal harvesting, migratory stocks, age-structured models, and size models.

Fisheries tend to collapse because of fleet over-capacity, leading to harvesting the stocks of fish beyond their ability to recover. On the other hand, fish stocks may also be under-utilized because of fleet under-capacity. The fishery managers have to strike a balance by directly controlling the fishing capacity (input control) and/or by setting restrictions on the catch (output control). The key factor in the success of striking this balance is the application of fisheries management based on scientific advice coming from results of stock assessment models. This book entitled "Fish Population Dynamics and Stock Assessment" has been written to meet the requirements of graduate, post graduate students, researchers and scientists in fish stock assessment. Written in a textbook form, this book encompasses the knowledge of principles of stock assessment, sampling techniques, age determination, growth parameters, mortality parameters, gear selection, stock assessment models, fisheries management etc. If this book could help and guide the students and researchers, we shall feel amply rewarded. The book contains 16 chapters that have been explained very clearly with numerous illustrative examples, leaving no scope for confusion.