DemFish · Integrating empirical and modelling research to assess climate change impacts on demersal fish communities

Demersal, bottom-living, fish are a globally important marine resource accounting for 35% of global fisheries catches. Future projections suggest that demersal fish community biomass will decline in most continental shelves due to climate change. Yet, these predictions have not been validated, neither across marine regions nor with shifting climatic conditions, limiting their practical use in fisheries management. My goal is to therefore integrate empirical and theoretical research and assess climate change impacts on demersal fish communities across North Atlantic shelf ecosystems. The project has three objectives (i) examine cross-regional variation and temporal change in demersal biomass and fisheries catches (ii) validate and improve a fish community model with the results of objective 1, and (iii) project how demersal fish communities will respond to future changes in temperature and resources. The project will complement my skills in theoretical modelling with training in the empirical analysis of demersal fish community data. I will be supervised by Prof. Jeremy Collie from Rhode Island University US, who is strongly qualified to supervise a project seeking to bring together these two fields. I will analyze statistical models to determine variation in demersal biomass and catches in space and time. I will validate and improve a recently developed fish community model with the obtained empirical estimates. Lastly, I will use the validated model to project changes in demersal fish community biomass and production. The project is complemented with a secondment with training in fisheries economics to assess the economic impacts of my climate change projections. The project will move from theory to nature and through time, and this integrative framework will not only provide novel insights in predicting the fish productive capacity of ecosystems, but it will also set new standards on large-scale climate change projections of fish communities.