Ignacio A. Catalán

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• M.Sc. PhD
• Research Scientist at Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies

Early life survival is critical to successful replenishment of fish populations, and hypotheses developed under the Growth-Survival Paradigm (GSP) have guided investigations of controlling processes. The GSP postulates that recruitment depends on growth and mortality rates during early life stages, as well as their duration, after which the mortali...

Although inferring habitat selection and movement in wild fishes using otolith microchemistry has been the subject of much debate, experimental results suggest that complex environmental vs. life history interactions affect the incorporation of certain chemical elements into otoliths. We hypothesized that under relatively homogeneous hydrographic c...

Despite the recognised effectiveness of networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) as a biodiversity conservation instrument, MPA network design frequently disregards the importance of connectivity patterns. In the case of sedentary marine populations, connectivity stems not only from the stochastic nature of the physical environment that affects di...

Dispersal shapes population connectivity and plays a critical role in marine metacommunities. Prominent species for coastal socioecological systems, such as jellyfish and spiny lobsters, feature long pelagic dispersal phases (LPDPs), which have long been overlooked. Here, we use a cross-scale approach combining field surveys of these species with a...

Further investigation is needed to improve the identification and classification of fish in underwater images using artificial intelligence, specifically deep learning. Questions that need to be explored include the importance of using diverse backgrounds, the effect of (not) labeling small fish on precision, the number of images needed for success...

Climate change continues to alter the productivity of commercially and culturally important fisheries with major consequences for food security and coastal economies. We provide the first, multi-model projections of changes in the distribution and productivity of 18 key fish stocks across seven European regional seas spanning the Mediterranean to t...

Supplementary material for Catalán, I. A., Bowlin, N. M., Baker, M. R., Berg, F., Brazier, A., Brochier, T., … Ospina-Álvarez, A. (2025). "Worldwide Appraisal of Knowledge Gaps in the Space Usage of Small Pelagic Fish: Highlights Across Stock Uncertainties and Research Priorities." Reviews in Fisheries Science & Aquaculture, 1–62. https://doi.org/1...

Understanding the spatial structure of life cycle components of small pelagic fish (SPF) stocks is key for deciphering population dynamics and ensuring sustainable management. The spatial extent of different life stages and ecologically relevant processes (e.g., reproduction) is temporally dynamic and responds to environmental, genetic, and demogra...

Supplementary tables for Catalán, I. A., Bowlin, N. M., Baker, M. R., Berg, F., Brazier, A., Brochier, T., … Ospina-Álvarez, A. (2025). Worldwide Appraisal of Knowledge Gaps in the Space Usage of Small Pelagic Fish: Highlights Across Stock Uncertainties and Research Priorities. Reviews in Fisheries Science & Aquaculture, 1–62. https://doi.org/10.10...

Mediterranean fisheries face critical challenges, with European hake (Merluccius merluccius) exemplifying both high ecological and commercial value and severe overexploitation. Sustainable management is further complicated by the species’ complex spatial population structure, necessitating high-resolution data such as on length distributions. In th...

Seabirds' distribution is generally influenced by the ecological dynamics of marine environments. Understanding how oceanographic features shape seabird foraging behaviour remains a challenge. We combined GPS tracking locations (n = 2883) of 39 European Storm-petrels (Hydrobates pelagicus) breeding in four West Mediterranean colonies during incubat...

Climate warming is causing shifts in reproductive phenology, a crucial life history trait determining offspring survival and population productivity. Evaluating these impacts on exploited marine resources is essential for implementing adaptive measures from an ecosystemic approach. This study introduces a statistical model designed to predict fish...

Early-life stages play a key role in the dynamics of bipartite life cycle marine fish populations. Difficult to monitor, observations of these stages are often scattered in space and time. While Mediterranean coastlines have often been surveyed, no effort has been made to assemble historical observations. Here we build an exhaustive compilation of...

The Working Group on Small Pelagic Fish (WGSPF) was established to review progress on un-derstanding how environmental and anthropogenic factors influence Small Pelagic Fish (SPF) population dynamics across different ecosystems. The group’s main aim is to foster international and multidisciplinary collaboration to establish comparative analyses and...

Populations of small pelagic fish (SPF), such as sardines, anchovies and herrings, support some of the largest marine fisheries globally and are critical for trophic transfer in large marine ecosystems and food security, particularly in low- to medium-income countries. Marked changes in population size, shifts in distribution on multiple time scale...

Populations of small pelagic fish (SPF), such as sardines, anchovies and herrings, sup-port some of the largest marine fisheries globally and are critical for trophic transfer in large marineecosystems and food security, particularly in low- to medium-income countries. Marked changesin population size, shifts in distribution on multiple time scales...

Seagrass meadows fulfil an essential ecosystem service by providing nursery habitats to various fish species. However, the habitat features driving this function remain insufficiently explored. Nevertheless, this knowledge is essential to quantify the ecosystem service provision, inform restoration efforts, and address the impact of habitat loss an...

Early-life stages play a key role in the spatio-temporal dynamics of marine populations due to their highly dispersive properties, their sensitivities to environmental factors and their influences on juveniles’ replenishment. However, these stages are difficult to monitor, so that in-situ observations are scarce and disparate, preventing a good und...

This study aimed to highlight potential climate change risks to fish species associated with Posidonia, integrating data on species' thermal envelopes with their habitat and depth preferences into a climate change risk index

Early-life stages play a key role in the dynamics of bipartite life cycle marine fish populations. Difficult to monitor, observations of these stages are often scattered in space and time. While Mediterranean coastlines have been highly surveyed, no effort was made to assemble historical observations. Here we build an exhaustive compilation of disp...

The use of Deep learning techniques in the field of Marine Science has become popular in recent years. For instance, many works propose the application of instance segmentation neural networks (in particular, Mask R-CNN) for detection and classification of fish in underwater images. The performance of these learning-based approaches depends heavily...

Marine population connectivity involves organism movement and interactions in oceanic and coastal settings. It is essential for biodiversity by aiding genetic diversity, species distribution, and recovery from disturbances. It guides resource management strategies like fisheries and conservation planning, ensuring marine ecosystem sustainability. S...

Fish differ consistently in behavior within the same species and population, reflecting distinct behavioral types (BTs). Comparing the behavior of wild and reared individuals provides an excellent opportunity to delve into the ecological and evolutionary consequences of BTs. In this work, we evaluated the behavioral variation of wild and reared juv...

Novel insights were provided by contrasting the composition of wild and farmed fish gut microbiomes because the latter had essentially different environmental conditions from those in the wild. This was reflected in the gut microbiome of the wild Sparus aurata and Xyrichtys novacula studied here, which showed highly diverse microbial community stru...

Fish differ consistently in behavior within the same species and population, reflecting distinct behavioral types (BTs). Comparing the behavior of wild and reared individuals provides an excellent opportunity to delve into the ecological and evolutionary consequences of BTs. In this work, we evaluated the behavioral variation of wild and reared juv...

Dispersal shapes population connectivity and plays a critical role in marine metacommunities. Prominent species for coastal socioecological systems, such as jellyfish and spiny lobsters, feature long pelagic dispersal phases (LPDPs), which have long been overlooked. Here, we use a cross-scale approach combining field surveys of these species with a...

With the advent of deep-learning (DL) techniques, image annotation has become a fundamental part of the research process. In the case of underwater image annotation, the human in charge of the task is faced whith the inherent quality problems of this kind of images. A large number of underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods have been developed ai...

When training a neural network for object detection a great deal of effort is usually devoted to augment the training dataset. The rationale behind this process is that augmentation increases the generalization capability of the network. However, little attention has been paid to the application of image enhancement techniques as a pre-processing s...

The European hake Merluccius merluccius is the third most valuable species for the North-East Atlantic and the Mediterranean fisheries. European hake has been rated as overexploited in the Mediterranean, thus careful management is advisable. Mediterranean hake is well-differentiated from Atlantic hake, but sub-population structure within the Medite...

Efforts to manage small and medium-sized pelagic fishes (SMPF) using traditional stock assessment methods are hampered by the elusive relationship between spawning stock biomass and recruitment. We propose to compute a reproductive resilience index (RRI) in three steps: (i) we selected 16 biological traits related to distinct aspects of SMPF reprod...

Generalized depletion models have proven useful to provide management information for data-limited fisheries. These models are suitable for stocks with fast depletion and recruitment inputs that reset the depletion. The Mediterranean common dolphinfish (Coryphaena hippurus) fishery shows these dynamics, being seasonally exploited mainly by fish agg...

Worldwide climate change will influence the spatial distribution and status of exploited fish stocks, often in uncertain ways with cascading effects on the social-ecological systems depending on them. Likewise, changes in sociopolitical conditions influencing consumer demand, fuel, and fish prices may jeopardize the viability of fisheries. Predicti...

Informed fishery management decisions require primary input data such as the fluctuations in the number of fish landed and fish length. Obtaining these data can be costly if conducted by hand, which is the case for length data in most fisheries. This cost often implies reduced sample sizes, which may introduce biases and lead to information loss at...

1. Sound production represents an integral part of social communication in many teleost fish; however, few studies have investigated the structure, organization and variability of fish sounds at the community level. 2. Fish acoustic community structure was recorded simultaneously in three sites located along the Mediterranean basin within the ende...

Oceans are no longer inaccessible places for data acquisition. High-throughput technological advances applied to marine sciences ( from genes to global current patterns ) are generating Big Data sets at unprecedented rates. How to manage, store, analyse, use and transform this data deluge into knowledge is now a fundamental challenge for ocean scie...

We analyzed the influence of the stratification process in the vertical distribution of larval fish in a microtidal coastal Mediterranean zone. By applying a Self Organizing Maps (SOM) technique, we could analyze a complex dataset accounting for non-linear processes. The analysis integrated multivariate data on larval fish and environmental paramet...

Increasing sea temperature is a driver of change for many fish traits, particularly for fast-growing epipelagic species with short life spans. With warming, altered spawning phenology and faster growth may produce substantially larger body sizes of the new cohort, affecting fishery productivity. We present an individual-based model (IBM) that predi...

Climate change is anticipated to have long-term and widespread direct consequences for the European marine ecosystems and subsequently for the European fishery sector. Additionally, many socio-economic and political factors linked to climate change scenarios will impact the future development of fishing industries. Robust projection modeling of bio...

Small pelagic fish in the new millennium: A bottom-up view of global research effort, Progress in Oceanography (2020), doi: https://doi.

The first weeks in life are crucial for the fate of fish. During this period, fish show large dispersal rates and suffer from massive mortality due mainly to predation. Intrinsic and extrinsic processes (growth rates, advection, behavior, diseases) affect this mortality and have profound consequences on populations. For a century now, describing th...

The original article has been corrected. A mistake in the author name E. Ramírez-Romero has been corrected.

We studied the effect of climate change on the potential spawning habitats of two marine small pelagic fishes. We examined the projected changes in the potential spawning habitat of the summer-spawning anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and round sardinella (Sardinella aurita) in the northwestern Mediterranean by combining the regionalized projection...

Numerical modeling is a key tool to complement the current physical and biogeochemical observational datasets. It is essential for understanding the role of oceanographic processes on marine food webs and producing climate change projections of variables affecting key ecosystem functions. In this work, we evaluate the horizontal and vertical patter...

Seasonal and spatial vertical profiles of data and model outputs, and much more

The common dolphinfish (Coryphaena hippurus) is an epipelagic thermophilic species with a worldwide distribution in tropical and subtropical regions that is characterized by its migratory behavior and fast growth rates. This species is targeted by artisanal small-scale and recreational fisheries in most regions where it is found. This paper updates...

Chemical cues from predators induce a range of predator-induced morphological defences (PIMDs) observed across fish taxa. However, the mechanisms, consistency, direction and adaptive value of PIMDs are still poorly studied. Here, we have tested if predatory cues can induce changes in the body shape of the juvenile marine fish Sparus aurata reared u...

This report distils the main results of the EU H2020 project CERES "Climate Change and European Fisheries and Aquaculture" (grant number 678193) executed between 2016 and 2020. See the report for citation format.

Reproductive phenology, growth and mortality rates are key ecological parameters that determine population dynamics and are therefore of vital importance to stock assessment models for fisheries management. In many fish species, the spawning phenology is sensitive to environmental factors that modulate or trigger the spawning event, which differ be...

The dynamics of fish length distribution is a key input for understanding the fish population dynamics and taking informed management decisions on exploited stocks. Nevertheless, in most fisheries, the length of landed fish is still made by hand. As a result, length estimation is precise at fish level, but due to the inherent high costs of manual s...

The ICES Working Group on comparative analyses between European Atlantic and Mediterra-nean Ecosystems to move towards an Ecosystem-based Approach to Fisheries (WGCOMEDA) recently completed its second three-year cycle. WGCOMEDA was established in 2014 and works in cooperation with other groups within the ICES Integrated Ecosystem Assessments Steeri...

Although scientific studies have addressed the effects of ocean thermal increase on distribution shifts of marine species, few studies have focused on migrating large pelagic species from temperate regions. Many tropical and subtropical large pelagic species like mahi-mahi (or dolphinfish, Coryphaena hippurus) are known to exhibit strong responses...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) uses hydrophones to record all components of underwater soundscapes, including fish calls. Several studies have used PAM to investigate different aspects of vocal fish species, such as presence, distribution, relative abundance, diel, lunar and seasonal cycle of activity as well as for delimitating spawning areas a...

The within-year dynamics of the juvenile fish community over a shallow nursery seagrass-dominated habitat (Posidonia oceanica) in a Mediterranean Bay was compared between two surveys separated 50 years (1960 and 2012-2013). A nocturnal survey over depths ranging from 2 to 10 m over patched seagrass meadows was conducted for one year (2012-2013) thr...

Technological advances in underwater video recording are opening novel opportunities for monitoring wild fish. However, extracting data from videos is often challenging. Nevertheless, it has been recently demonstrated that accurate and precise estimates of density for animals (whose normal activities are restricted to a bounded area or home range)...

Technological advances in underwater video recording are opening novel opportunities for monitoring wild fish. However, extracting data from videos is often challenging. Nevertheless, it has been recently demonstrated that accurate and precise estimates of density for animals (whose normal activities are restricted to a bounded area or home range)...

An amalgam of empirical data from laboratory and field studies is needed to build robust, theoretical models of climate impacts that can provide science-based advice for sustainable management of fish and shellfish resources. Using a semi-systematic literature review, Gap Analysis and multilevel meta-analysis, we assessed the status of empirical kn...

Understanding the connectivity patterns of marine populations is essential for their management and conservation. In the case of sedentary marine populations, connectivity stems not only from the stochastic nature of the physical environment that affects early-life stages dispersal, but also by the spawning stock attributes that affect reproductive...

Marine resource management is shifting from optimizing single species yield to redefining sustainable fisheries within the context of managing ocean use and ecosystem health. In this introductory article to the theme set, "Plugging spatial ecology into ecosystem-based management (EBM)" we conduct an informal horizon scan with leaders in EBM researc...

Short-term hypoxia that lasts just a few days or even hours is a major threat for the marine ecosystems. The single effect of the human-induced levels of hypoxia and other anthropogenic impacts such as elevated pCO2 can reduce the ability of preys to detect their predators across taxa. Moreover, both processes, hypoxia and elevated pCO2, are expect...

Larval dispersal mechanisms, although significantly studied, are far from being completely resolved. Local studies are needed to clarify key interactions between individual life cycles and transport processes. The Atlantic-Mediterranean connection through the Strait of Gibraltar is a particularly important area to explore these processes, as a hots...

Many studies underscore the importance of incorporating the effect of environmental data within a life-history-stage-specific framework for determining the recruitment and survival of small pelagic fish. The recruitment of anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) in the Gulf of Cádiz (NE Atlantic) is sensitive to the effect of intense easterlies, stratific...

Integrated models are able to combine several sources of data into a single analysis using joint likelihood functions, fostering the consistency of assumptions among analyses and the ability to diagnose goodness of fit and model-misspecification. Owing to their capacity to consistently combine diverse information, integrated models could detect the...

The use of stereo underwater video cameras for monitoring marine fish is spreading. We have developed a low-cost stereo video cameras for estimating fish length with high precision and accuracy, including small juveniles. Current applications of underwater video technique at the Fish Ecology Group at IMEDEA, www.fishecology.es.

Seagrasses provide an important ecological value as nursery habitats, hosting higher juvenile densities than their surrounding less-structured habitats by offering shelter and food to early stages of fish. However, the quantitative evaluations of this nursery function remain elusive. Surveys assessing abundances of juvenile fish over seagrass meado...

In order to recruit into adult populations juvenile fish must be able to find food, successfully compete with other organisms and avoid predation within a habitat, in other words they must be able to locate favourable and avoid detrimental conditions. Biochemical research into fish detection and discrimination between chemical cues is extensive, ho...

Human pressure on coastal areas is affecting essential ecosystems including fish nursery habitats. Among these anthropogenic uses, the seasonal increment in the pressure due to leisure activities such as coastal tourism and yachting is an important environmental stressor in many coastal zones. These pressures may elicit understudied impacts due to,...

In this work we focus on the Alboran Sea (western Mediterranean) to relate wind field and ocean velocity variability with chlorophyll a (Chl a) behaviour, using a 2-km resolution, coupled 3D ocean circulation-NPZD model (ROMS). The analysis is done in three steps. First, we split the seasonal and residual contribution for the fields under study. Se...

A close relationship between adult abundance and stock productivity may not exist for many marine fish stocks, resulting in concern that the management goal of maximum sustainable yield is either inefficient or risky. Although reproductive success is tightly coupled with adult abundance and fecundity in many terrestrial animals, in exploited marine...