Erla Sturludottir

• PhD
• Specialist in ecological modelling at Marine and Freshwater Research Institute Iceland

Winter storage of seedlings in freezers reduces the amount of heat sum available for growth in the following growing season compared to seedlings stored outdoors. To test the effects of a reduced growing period on the autumn frost hardiness of the six species most used in Icelandic afforestation, seedlings were stored outdoors or in a freezer durin...

While Iceland has an advanced and well-developed fisheries management system most species are managed individually, that is without consideration for their role in and interactions with the whole ecosystem or with the fact that fisheries target multiple species in different areas and at different times of the year. But long-term sustainability of t...

Simple Summary For the extraction of equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG), mares in the first 2–4 months of pregnancy are harvested for blood. The extracted eCG has been used in pharmaceutical products for the control of reproduction in other animal species. Blood harvesting from mares has raised concerns around their welfare, such as the possibilit...

Background Few studies have been conducted on haematological reference intervals (RIs) in Icelandic horses. Reference intervals have been published for Icelandic horses in Austria and a preliminary study in Iceland compared haematological values in riding horses to published RIs for other breeds as well as Icelandic horses abroad. Haematological pa...

This paper investigates how the spatial resolution of slope data affects the modelling of recreational trails in mountainous areas. It measures the impact of spatial resolution on a) the estimation of cost functions that link walking speeds and slope, and b) the modelling of moving times and mapping of routes using these functions. Cost functions t...

Environmental monitoring by aluminium smelters in Iceland has included fluoride analysis of sheep and horse mandibles. Statistical modelling was done retrospectively on fluoride analyses of sheep and horses from 2007 to 2019. Relationships between the fluoride concentration in bone tissue and the age and the regional origin of the animals were inve...

Several restoration methods have been developed to aid ecosystem development from highly degraded Icelandic deserts into fully vegetated functional ecosystems. Despite the critical role of soil biota in many key ecosystem processes, the effect of restoration efforts on soil biota has rarely been explored. We took advantage of a large-scale restorat...

The Arctic may be particularly vulnerable to the consequences of both ocean acidification (OA) and global warming, given the faster pace of these processes in comparison with global average speeds. Here, we use the Atlantis ecosystem model to assess how the trophic network of marine fishes and invertebrates in the Icelandic waters is responding to...

Balanced harvest (BH) refers to applying moderate fishing pressure across a broad range of species, trophic levels (TL), stocks, or sizes in an ecosystem in proportion to productivity (gross production per biomass unit) or production (total cumulated biomass over a given period) instead of exerting pressure on particular taxa or sizes. Both modelli...

Most small scale inland fisheries worldwide are open access, and fishing provides the only source of employment and livelihood for the riparian communities. Management of these fisheries requires information on trade-offs between fish production, profits from fishing, employment, and conservation objectives. We use the non-linear optimization proce...

Long-term time series data are not available for many of the African Great Lakes. This precludes fitting ecosystem model parameters to time series data, and we do not know how reliable non-fitted models are compared to fitted ones in terms of predicting consequences of alternative management strategies. To investigate this, we generate a historical...

Ecosystem simulation models are valuable quantitative decision tools for supporting ecosystem-based fisheries management. However, the application of ecosystem models in fisheries management is still undermined by the lack of simple procedures to test the effect of model uncertainty on policy outcomes. The use of multiple ecosystem models is viewed...

The common fisheries policy aims at eliminating discarding which has been part of fisheries for centuries. It is important to monitor the compliance with the new regulations but estimating the discard rate is a challenging task, especially where the practise is illegal. The aim of this study was to review a length-based method that has been used to...

Ecosystem simulation models are valuable tools for strengthening and promoting ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM). However, utility of these models in practical fisheries management is often undermined by lack of simple means to test the effect of uncertainty on model outputs. Recently, the use of multiple ecosystem models has been recomme...

Icelandic waters are very productive and the fisheries are economically important for the Icelandic nation. The importance of the fisheries has led to progressive fisheries management and extensive monitoring of the ecosystem. However, fisheries management is mainly built on single species stock assessment models, and multi-species or ecological mo...

Highlights o A Jacobian Matrix of all long-term yields on all current fishing mortality rates are shown for each available model. o These enable the principle interactions within and between species in each area to be compared. o These also allow the construction of a simple multispecies index for each species in each model in each area. o These al...

Fishing activities have broad impacts that affect, although not exclusively, the targeted stocks. These impacts affect predators and prey of the harvested species, as well as the whole ecosystem it inhabits. Ecosystem models can be used to study the interactions that occur within a system, including those between different organisms and those betwe...

Discarding fish has been a part of the fisheries for centuries but it has been very difficult to monitor how much is discarded, especially in areas where it is an illegal activity. In this study the ecological and economic effects of discarding were investigated using the Atlantis model for Icelandic waters. Five different scenarios were compared,...

Fisheries management of Lake Victoria has evolved from traditional belief systems of local fishing communities to one with formal national and regional institutions. The impact of management interventions utilized so far is difficult to assess. With the advent of whole ecosystem models, management strategy evaluation has taken root elsewhere. The f...

In this study, a changepoint model, which can detect either a mean shift or a trend change when accounting for autocorrelation in short time-series, was investigated with simulations and a new method is proposed. The changepoint hypotheses were tested using a likelihood ratio test. The test statistic does not follow a known distribution and depends...

The rock ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) is a popular game bird in Iceland, but the population has endured a long‐term decline. A hunting ban was enforced in 2003, but 2 years later hunting was allowed again with added restrictions. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of a change in hunting regulations on the ptarmigan population in north...

Lake Victoria has experienced human induced pressures such as overfishing, introduction of alien species, increased eutrophication and climate change impacts. However, there is limited understanding of the system dynamics, major processes, drivers and responses to the changes. To address this challenge, we developed the first end-to-end whole ecosy...

Increased biodiversity may improve ecosystem services, including herbage yield. A mixture experiment was carried out at five sites in Northern Europe and one in Canada to investigate whether mixtures of grasses and legumes would give higher herbage yield than monocultures. Resistance of the mixtures to weed invasion and nutritive value of the herba...

Contaminants have been analyzed in cod (Gadus morhua) since 1990 as part of the national monitoring program for the environmental conditions in the sea around Iceland. The aim of this study was to determine the temporal trends of persistent organic pollutants (POPs: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), p,p'-dichlorodiphenyl dichloroethene (p,p'-DDE),...

Contaminants have been determined in blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) at 11 locations around the Icelandic coastline from 1990 to 2010. The aim of the present study was to investigate if there has been a change in concentration of contaminants around the Icelandic coastline for the last two decades and if the concentrations and changes, if present, we...