Jose M. Bellido

Instituto Español de Oceanografia | IEO · Centro Oceanográfico de Murcia

The study of the trophic position (TP) of organisms is crucial to understand the trophodynamics of ecosystems. The European sardine from the western Mediterranean has been highly exploited during the last decades and has shown an important population decline. To determine the TP, we quantified seasonal δ15N values of amino acids (CSIA-AA), as well...

By evaluating genetic variation across the entire genome, one can address existing questions in a novel way while raising new ones. The latter include how different local environments influence adaptive and neutral genomic variation within and among populations, providing insights into local adaptation of natural populations and their responses to...

Fish body condition and growth are two interrelated traits closely associated with species life history and fitness, whose trade-off can ultimately impact population dynamics albeit seldom empirically demonstrated. They can intricately affect survival rates, which are particularly relevant for species under exploitation. Using individual spatiotemp...

It is widely known that the abundance and distribution dynamics of populations of small pelagic clupeid fish, such as sardines and anchovies, are affected by large-scale climate variability, which may lead to changeovers to new regimes of small pelagics. However, long-distance climatic oscillations , such as El Niño/La Niña and the Pacific Decadal...

Nineteen megabenthic assemblages have been identified in the SE Iberian area by analysing ROV transects (183-1735m depth) during the LIFE IP Intemares project, based on habitat-forming species and their abundance, substratum type, sediment cover and depth.

Small pelagic fish (SPF) species such as European sardine Sardina pilchardus , European anchovy Engraulis encrasicolus , round sardinella Sardinella aurita and European sprat Sprattus sprattus play important ecological roles in the Mediterranean Sea marine ecosystem. However, changes in SPF abundance and biomass have recently been observed in the b...

Small pelagic fish (SPF) are key organisms for the functioning of pelagic marine ecosystems. In recent decades, these species have undergone significant changes in biomass, growth and body condition in the Mediterranean Sea. Seasonal and spatial information about changes in biological and ecological traits of SPF and their relationship with environ...

Sardine and anchovy have shown important changes in landings, biomass, abundance and body condition with time in the Western Mediterranean Sea. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain these changes, including the negative interaction with jellyfish blooms. Increases in jellyfish blooms may be one of the reasons for a decline in these fish...

The northward expansion of round sardinella (Sardinella aurita) in the Mediterranean Sea, together with declines and fluctuations in biomass and landings of European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) and anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) observed in recent decades, may suggest potential inter-specific competition in the pelagic domain. The coexistence of...

Concentrations of organophosphate esters (OPEs) plasticizers were analysed in the present study. Fifty-five fish samples belonging to three highly commercial species, European sardine (Sardina pilchardus), European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus), and European hake (Merluccius merluccius), were taken from the Western Mediterranean Sea. OPEs were d...

European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and sardine (Sardina pilchardus) are crucial species for the marine ecosystem of the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea. They account for a high percentage of fish landings and they represent an important economic income for the fishery sector. Concerns over their stock status are rising in recent years as biom...

By evaluating genetic variation across the entire genome, one can address existing questions in a novel way while new can be asked. Such questions include how different local environments influence both adaptive and neutral genomic variation within and among populations, providing insights not only into local adaptation of natural populations, but...

Small pelagic fish (SPF) in the western Mediterranean Sea are key elements of the marine food web and are important in terms of biomass and fisheries catches. Significant declines in biomass, landings, and changes in the age/size structure of sardine Sardina pilchardus and anchovy Engraulis encrasicolus have been observed in recent decades, particu...

A food-web comparative modeling approach using Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) was built to characterize the ecosystem of the Gulf of Alicante (GoA) and investigate its singularities. The GoA differs from neighboring ecosystems of the Western Mediterranean Sea because of its different oceanographic characteristics. We developed a model of the study area...

The current European Union has been progressively implementing since January 2014 a discard ban which includes the obligation to land unwanted catch for certain regulated species and sizes. Although a full enforcement of the landing obligation has a direct impact on discard reduction through more responsible and selective fishing, fishers argue tha...

Natural resources management deals with highly complex socioecological systems. This complexity raises a conundrum, since wide-ranging knowledge from different sources and types is needed, but at the same time none of these types of knowledge is able by itself to provide the basis for a viable productive system, and mismatches between the two of th...

European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and sardine (Sardina pilchardus) are crucial species for the marine ecosystem of the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea. They account for a high percentage of fish landings and they represent an important economic income. Concerns over their stock status are rising in recent years as biomass, growth, reproducti...

There is a general lack of information related to the spatial structure and functioning of marine ecosystems considering seasonality. Here we modelled the biomass distribution of eight commercial marine species in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea during winter and summer. We hypothesised that the seasonal differences of the water column and the s...

European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and sardine (Sardina pilchardus) are two of the most important small pelagic fish species in terms of biomass and commercial interest in the Mediterranean Sea. Their populations are clearly influenced by environmental variations, making them good bio-indicators of climate-driven changes. Here, we reviewed t...

The European Union (EU) is one of the most important markets for cephalopods in the world. Currently, small-scale fisheries targeting octopus in the EU are of considerable social and economic importance, especially in southern European waters where more octopus are consumed as part of the traditional diet. Octopus in Europe are excluded from quota...

Sustainable fishing practices must ensure human wellbeing by safeguarding the integrity of marine life-supporting systems. Unfortunately, a significant challenge to fisheries management is that sustainable fishing levels can decline, often synergistically, by co-occurring with climate-driven environmental stressors. Within one of the most impacted...

This work combines state-of-the-art methods (DNA metabarcoding) with classic approaches (visual stomach content characterization and stable isotope analyses of nitrogen (δ15N) and carbon (δ13C)) to investigate the trophic ecology of anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and sardine (Sardina pilchardus) at high taxonomic and spatial resolution in the Wes...

The dietary preferences of 61 Western Mediterranean species of fish belonging to different trophic levels were studied. Specimens were collected during the annual bottom trawl survey MEDITS for the period 2011-2018, with a total of 16,588 stomach contents analyzed, providing a highly valuable raw dataset for advanced studies in trophic ecology. The...

Article 4 of EU Regulation 1380/2013 on the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) define ‘technical measure’ as “a measure that regulates the composition of catches by species and size and the impacts on components of the ecosystems resulting from fishing activities by establishing conditions for the use and structure of fishing gear and restrictions on ac...

In the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea, the European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) and the European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) are the most important small pelagic fish in terms of biomass and commercial interest. During the last years, these species have experimented changes in their abundance and biomass trends in the Northwestern Mediterrane...

Understanding the spatiotemporal persistence of fish distributions is key to defining fish hotspots and effective fisheries restricted areas (FRAs). Hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal models provide an excellent framework to understand these distributions as they can accommodate different spatiotemporal behaviour in the data, primarily due to the...

We quantified the incidence of microplastics in the gut contents of the European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) and anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea and tested which variables influence this abundance, including the prevalence of parasites (i.e., trematoda larvae and nematodes). We detected a 58% occurrence of mi...

Marine ecosystems are complex socio-ecological systems where sustainable solutions can be best gained by satisfying both conservation and socioeconomic demands. Concretely, the Mediterranean Sea is facing a huge demand of resources and marine activities while hosting abundant and unique biodiversity. It is considered an important elasmobranch hotsp...

The MARTEC18 Conference “International Conference on advances in marine technologies applied to discard mitigation and management” was held from May 2nd to 5th, 2018 in Vigo. MARTEC18 welcomed 118 attendees and 48 worldwide speakers from 17 Research Centers, Universities, 3 Business Companies and representatives from FAO, regional, national and Eur...

Reducing the impact on vulnerable species through changes in fishing practices, such as the spatial or temporal avoidance of certain areas, is key to increase the ecological sustainability of fisheries. However, it is often hampered by the availability of sufficiently detailed data and robust indicators. Existing trawl surveys are a cost-effective...

Most studies on European hake focus on the recruitment process and nursery areas, whereas the information is comparatively limited on the ecology of the juvenile stage (ca. second year of life)-the one most exploited by the Medi-terranean trawl fisheries. Using information of the MEDITS programme, we provide a spatial and temporal assessment of the...

The Mediterranean distributions of two species of anglerfish, the blackbellied anglerfish (Lophius budegassa) and the white anglerfish (Lophius piscatorius), were analysed from trawl survey data (MEDITS project – Spain, France, Italy and Greece) from 2006 to 2015 implementing a Delta model approach with residuals autocovariate boosted regression tr...

Most studies on European hake focus on the recruitment process and nursery areas, whereas the information is comparatively limited on the ecology of the juvenile stage (ca. second year of life)-the one most exploited by the Medi-terranean trawl fisheries. Using information of the MEDITS programme, we provide a spatial and temporal assessment of the...

The Common Fisheries Policy in the Mediterranean has been so far based on technical measures that have been relatively stable for a long time, and it did not prevent the efficiency increase in both vessels and gears that have counterbalanced the fleet reduction. The new Multiannual Plan for Demersal fish stocks in the western Mediterranean Sea intr...

Most fisheries management systems rely on a set of regulatory measures to achieve desired objectives. Controls on catch and effort are usually supplemented with gear restrictions, minimum landing sizes, and in the framework of the new common fisheries policy, limitation of discards and by-catch. However, the increasing use of spatial management mea...

Information on the spatial patterns and habitat preferences of marine species is key to understand the functioning of marine ecosystem and to manage and protect marine resources efficiently. However, the study of spatial patterns of marine ecosystems is challenging because they are dynamic environments that can vary seasonally. We analysed the spat...

Discarding is one of the most important topics in fisheries management, both for economic and ecological reasons. The European Union has included, through the current EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) Regulation, a discard ban with a quite controversial instrument: to enforce the landing of unwanted catch as a measure to promote their reduction. Thi...

Diet tracing in small pelagic fish: a multi-proxy approach to depict new trophic links in the NW Mediterranean

As Uhlman et al. (2014) say, discard rates are highly variable at European level and are more heterogeneous across regions than in different fisheries. Therefore, it is known that there are variations at the regional level, but it is unknown if these differences are given to Mesoscale, in a radius of approximately 200km. The objective of the presen...

The multi-species/multi-gear nature of the Mediterranean fisheries, the high number and dispersion of landing points, and the varying motivations for discarding make regulation enforcement in the basin challenging. In this study, reasons for explaining discarding are initially explored and then the main focus is on identifying potential incentive m...

Bycatch and discards from small-scale fisheries (SSF) are usually ignored when compared with industrial fisheries, not only by policy-makers, but also by scientists. Therefore, SSF social, economic and ecological impacts are poorly known and especially in the context of incidental catches, regardless of whether they become bycatch or discards. Such...

The spatial prediction of species distributions from survey data is a significant component of spatial planning and the ecosystem-based management approach to marine resources. Statistical analysis of species occurrences and their relationships with associated environmental factors is used to predict how likely a species is to occur in unsampled lo...

Most studies on European hake focus on the recruitment process and nursery areas while the information is comparatively limited on the ecology of juvenile stage (ca. second year of life) − the most exploited by the Mediterranean trawl fisheries. Using information of the MEDITS program, we provide a spatial and temporal assessment of the influence o...

Globally, commercial fisheries have had a strong impact on elasmobranch populations directly through high catch rates and indirectly through by-catch. Consequently, the abundance of many species is declining and some of them are considered to be under threat of extinction. On a regional scale, this negative trend has also been evidenced in internat...

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are now being widely used in ecology for management and conservation purposes across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms. The increasing interest in SDMs has drawn the attention of ecologists to spatial models and, in particular, to geostatistical models, which are used to associate observations of species...

To assess the likely economic outcomes to fishing fleets of the Landing Obligation (LO), bioeconomic models covering seven European fisheries, ranging from the North East Atlantic to the Mediterranean, have been applied to estimate the economic performance of fleets before and after implementing the LO. It is shown that for most of the analysed fis...

A sensible approach to minimize discards is to avoid areas or seasons where unwanted catch may be present. The implementation of a Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) approach to discard management requires the understanding of marine biological processes, as well as fishing conditions at a defined spatial scale. Mathematical models that analyze the spat...

Composition, spatial distribution and temporal evolution of marine litter on the Spanish Mediterranean seafloor were assessed. The data derive from Spanish MEDITS surveys over 11 years and were analysed by GIS. A total amount of 2197.8 kg of litter was collected. Marine litter (by weight) was composed of plastics (29.3%), clinker (28.4%), wood (10....

The demersal fisheries in the Mediterranean Sea are heavily overfished but the landing obligation will not help to reach MSY because it will not decrease fishing mortality. The new proposal of the Commission introduces total allowable effort as a new way to regulate Western Mediterranean demersal fisheries by significantly reducing fishing time. Ho...

Assessing how environmental changes affect the distribution and dynamics of animal populations is becoming increasingly important, enabling ecologists to better predict the effects of global warming, biodiversity reduction or habitat degradation. In this context, the use of remotely sensed and modeled environmental variables play a key role by prov...

One of the fundamental aims of the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management is to ensure the long‐term sustainability of the fishery by protecting key life‐cycle habitats, such as recruitment areas. In this study, we apply a hurdle Bayesian hierarchical spatio‐temporal model that describes the abundance of European hake (Merluccius merluccius) re...

Fishing activity in waters beyond national jurisdiction generates multiple management issues, such as data poor fisheries, management of straddling fish stocks and lack of impact assessments on deep-sea Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs). Fishing strategy is the key to understanding and managing high seas fisheries, targeting highly migratory reso...

Many ecological processes are measured as proportions and are spatially sampled. In all these cases the standard procedure has long been the transformation of proportional data with the arcsine square root or logit transformation, without considering the spatial correlation in any way. This paper presents a robust regression model to analyse this k...

The ecosystem processes underlying the discard rates of the demersal otter-trawl fishery in the Alboran Sea, Western Mediterranean are investigated. We evaluate whether environmental and climatic variability, measured from operational oceanographic data, allow assessment of discarded species abundances. Monthly data collected by onboard fishery obs...

Participatory management is a working method of paramount importance based on the principles of knowledge sharing and accountability for addressing the sustainable management of the fishery sector. To approach this multidimensional problem we applied two Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and the...

Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamism and environmental relationships of species is essential for the conservation of natural resources. Many spatio-temporally sampled processes result in continuous positive [0, ∞) abundance datasets that have many zero values observed in areas that lie outside their optimum niche. In such cases the most commo...

Ecological indicators are increasingly used to examine the evolution of natural ecosystems and the impacts of human activities. Assessing their trends to develop comparative analyses is essential. We introduce the analysis of convergence, a novel approach to evaluate the dynamic and trends of ecological indicators and predict their behavior in the...

Spatially explicit risk assessment is an essential component of Marine Spatial Planning(MSP), which provides a comprehensive framework for managing multiple uses of the marine environment, minimizing environmental impacts and conflicts among users. In this study, we assessed the risk of the exposure to high intensity vessel traffic areas for the th...

The composition, spatial distribution and source of marine litter in the Spanish Southeast Mediterranean were assessed. The data proceed from a marine litter retention programme implemented by commercial trawlers and were analysed by GIS. By weight, 75.9% was plastic, metal and glass. Glass and plastics were mainly found close to the coast. A high...

Discarding is considered globally among the most important issues for fisheries management. The recent reform of the Common Fisheries Policy establishes a landing obligation for the species which are subject to catch limits and, in the Mediterranean, for species which are subject to Minimum Conservation Reference Size (MCRS) as defined in Annex III...

Discard management needs to draw on scientific research and advice, usually supported by specific statistical modeling analysis. A wide range of statistical analysis methods were applied to fishery data in an attempt to distinguish factors that influence the species discard composition. While such approaches are important, they are still incomplete...

A diversity of methodological approaches has been used in ecology to generate species distribution models (SDMs) and their amount has increased significantly during the last decades. Several studies have compared the performance of some of these techniques, offering relevant information on their use. These studies, however, have been mainly focused...

Atlantic bluefin tuna, managed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), is a top predator emblematic species with a key role in marine ecosystems. In spring bluefin tuna adults travel a long distance to reproduce in very confined areas such as the Balearic Sea, a major spawning ground worldwide located in the...

The spatial management of fisheries has been repeatedly proposed as a discard mitigation measure. A number of studies have assessed the fishing suitability of an area based on units of by-catch or discard per unit effort. However, correct identification of fishing-suitable areas should assess biomass loss with respect to the benefits. This study th...

The latest Green Paper on the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) identified the high level of discards in Europe as one of the structural weaknesses of the current CFP. The new CFP introduces a discard ban in European waters, with an obligation to land all regulated species. The fishing management system in the Mediterranean is based on effort contro...