Rebuilding overexploited marine populations is an important step to achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14-Life Below Water. Mitigating major human pressures is required to achieve rebuilding goals. Climate change is one such key pressure, impacting fish and invertebrate populations by changing their biomass and biogeography.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFisheries transform marine ecosystems and compete with predators [1], but temporal trends in seabird-fishery competition had never been assessed on a worldwide scale. Using catch reconstructions [2] for all fisheries targeting taxa that are also seabird prey, we demonstrated that average annual fishery catch increased from 59 to 65 million metric tons between 1970-1989 and 1990-2010. For the same periods, we estimated that global annual seabird food consumption decreased from 70 to 57 million metric tons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPostwar growth of industrial fisheries catch to its peak in 1996 was driven by increasing fleet capacity and geographical expansion. An investigation of the latter, using spatially allocated reconstructed catch data to quantify "mean distance to fishing grounds," found global trends to be dominated by the expansion histories of a small number of distant-water fishing countries. While most countries fished largely in local waters, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and China rapidly increased their mean distance to fishing grounds by 2000 to 4000 km between 1950 and 2014.
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