Commercial fisheries as non-designed experiments.

Commercial fisheries data often lacks the controlled environment of traditional experiments. In this note, we explore the limitations and strengths of observational and quasi-experimental approaches in fisheries science, discussing the challenges of establishing causality, space-time pseudo-replication, and the impact of fishing-induced evolution.

Larval dispersal of Brachyura in one of the largest estuarine/marine systems in the world.

The Amazon Continental Shelf (ACS) is a complex habitat that receives a large annual freshwater discharge into the ocean, producing a superficial plume and carrying with it large amounts of nutrients to the continental shelf along thousands of kilometers while sustaining high biodiversity in the estuary-ocean continuum. For the first time, this study monitored six sites in a wide transect with approximately 240 km radius on the ACS every 2-4 months. The objectives were (1) to analyze the composition of larval Brachyuran crabs and (2) to predict the importance of environmental parameters (temperature, salinity and chlorophyll-a) in structuring their abundance.

A modeling approach for reposition dynamics of litter composition in coastal areas of the city of Santos, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Given the complexity of the dynamics in litter reposition, our objective was modeling the possible main and interaction effects of tidal oscillations, seasons of the year and the moon phases over the solid waste in Santos beaches. A total of 80 collections were carried out using quadrat sampling, from which we classified, counted and weighed all residue items. We fitted mixed Hurdle models to the output datasets and performed hypotheses tests based on this framework.