Kristin Kleisner

Environmental Defense Fund

Both the ecological and social dimensions of fisheries are being affected by climate change. As a result, policymakers, managers, scientists and fishing communities are seeking guidance on how to holistically build resilience to climate change. Numerous studies have highlighted key attributes of resilience in fisheries, yet concrete examples that e...

Despite progress in understanding and predicting climate change impacts and possible responses for US marine fisheries, use of climate-related information in federal fishery management decisions remains limited. One barrier to progress in linking climate knowledge to management action is that individual management bodies' efforts tend to be isolate...

Las pesquerías multiespecíficas de peces en Cuba incluyen alrededor de 150 especies, diferentes artes de pesca que se utilizan simultáneamente y un número elevado de puertos de desembarques, lo que dificulta el monitoreo y la evaluación de estos recursos, por lo cual el manejo ha sido limitado. Por ello nos propusimos evaluar el estado actual, así...

Recreational fishing is a pillar of the multibillion-dollar tourism sector in the Caribbean, supporting economic development and community livelihoods. However, as climate change drives increased habitat degradation, key recreational target species may experience declines. To effectively prioritize adaptation and mitigation efforts it is critical t...

Crustacean fisheries represent an increasingly important contribution to global landings, food security and economic growth, especially in developing countries. However, many productive and valuable crustacean fisheries in Asian countries are characterized by limited data availability, scientific capacity, and fisheries management. Adaptive managem...

Undertaking climate vulnerability assessments (CVAs) on marine fisheries is instrumental to the identification of regions, species, and stakeholders at risk of impacts from climate change, and the development of effective and targeted responses for fisheries adaptation. In this global literature review, we addressed three important questions to cha...

Iceland's fisheries system is well-governed, data-rich, and has adapted to past ecological change. It thus provides an opportunity to identify social-ecological attributes of climate resilience and interactions among them. We elicited barriers and enabling conditions for adaptation in Iceland's fisheries from semi-structured expert interviews, usin...

In a changing climate, there is an imperative to build coupled social-ecological systems—including fisheries—that can withstand or adapt to climate stressors. Although resilience theory identifies system attributes that supposedly confer resilience, these attributes have rarely been clearly defined, mechanistically explained, nor tested and applied...

Through its vastness, resilience and biogeochemical complexity, the ocean offers humanity some of the largest potential natural pathways for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while avoiding new sources of anthropogenic emissions. In proposing a network of new marine protected areas in service of global ocean conservation, Sala et al. desc...

Knowledge co-production offers a promising approach to design effective and equitable pathways to reach development goals. Fisheries Strategies for Changing Oceans and Resilient Ecosystems by 2030 (FishSCORE), a United Nations Ocean Decade programme, will co-produce knowledge that advances solutions for climate resilient fisheries through networks...

One of the world's leading international nonprofit organizations, Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org) creates transformational solutions to the most serious environmental problems. To do so, EDF links science, economics, law, and innovative private-sector partnerships. With more than 2.5 million members and offices in the United States, China, Mex...

Integrated management of coral reef foods, as a highly diverse set of blue foods, can contribute to addressing the dual challenges of malnutrition and biodiversity loss. Advances in nutrition research have made it possible to understand nutritional benefits on a species by species basis, and to make comparisons with benefits derived from land-based...

In a changing climate, there is an imperative to build coupled social-ecological systems-including fisheries-that can withstand or adapt to climate stressors. Although resilience theory identifies system attributes that supposedly confer resilience , these attributes have rarely been clearly defined, mechanistically explained, nor tested and applie...

As climate change shifts marine species distribution and abundance worldwide, projecting local changes over decadal scales may be an adaptive strategy for managers and industry. In Iceland, one of the top fish-producing nations globally, long-term monitoring enables model simulations of groundfish species habitat distribution. We used generalized a...

Globally, wild decapod crustacean fisheries are growing faster than fisheries of any other major group, yet little attention has been given to the benefits, costs, and risks of this shift. We examined more than 60 years of global fisheries landings data to evaluate the socioeconomic and ecological implications of the compositional change in global...

Despite contributing to healthy diets for billions of people, aquatic foods are often undervalued as a nutritional solution because their diversity is often reduced to the protein and energy value of a single food type (‘seafood’ or ‘fish’)1–4. Here we create a cohesive model that unites terrestrial foods with nearly 3,000 taxa of aquatic foods to...

Fisheries are critically important for nutrition, food security, livelihoods, and culture of hundreds of millions of people globally. As climate impacts on ocean ecosystems increase, policy-makers are asking critical questions about how to implement reforms at local and national levels to reach goals around improving performance of management syste...

As climate change shifts marine species distribution and abundance worldwide, projecting local changes over decadal scales may be a valuable adaptive strategy for managers and industry. In Iceland, one of the top fish-producing nations in the world, long-term monitoring enables model simulations of groundfish species habitat distribution. We used g...

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this ‘fish as food’ perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities...

Changes in fish distribution are being observed across the globe. In Europe's Common Fisheries Policy, the share of the catch of each fish stock is split among management areas using a fixed allocation key known as ‘Relative Stability’: in each management area, member states get the same proportion of the total catch each year. That proportion is l...

Commercial fisheries catches by countries are documented since 1950 by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Unfortunately, this does not hold for marine recreational catches, of which only few, if any, estimates are reported to FAO. We reconstructed preliminary estimates of likely marine recreational catches for 1950—2014, based on independ...

Japanese fisheries are underperforming, with stock declines in some key domestic fisheries. This study examines tradeoffs between allowing current fishing mortality levels to continue versus adopting fishing mortality levels that are intended to maximize either yield or profitability in Japanese fisheries. Because stock status estimates exist for o...

Managing natural resources under large-scale environmental fluctuations like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is likely to become increasingly important under climate change. Forecasts of environmental conditions are improving, but the best response to an unfavorable forecast remains unclear: many practitioners advocate reducing harvest as a...

Biodiversity of marine-coastal ecosystems of Cuba sustains high levels of fishing activity. Due in part to heavy fishing pressure, managers and scientists recognize signs of overfishing for many stocks, intensified by increasing rates of tourism and coastal development. These factors threaten the health of those ecosystems and jeopardize the econom...

Many of the world's fisheries are unassessed, with little information about population status or risk of overfishing. Unassessed fisheries are particularly predominant in developing countries and in small‐scale fisheries, where they are important for food security. Several catch‐only methods based on time series of fishery catch and commonly availa...

The world’s oceans supply food and livelihood to billions of people, yet species’ shifting geographic ranges and changes in productivity arising from climate change are expected to profoundly affect these benefits. We ask how improvements in fishery management can offset the negative consequences of climate change; we find that the answer hinges on...

The role of spatial management, including marine protected areas, in achieving fisheries outcomes alongside conservation goals is debated. In fisheries that fail to meet fishing mortality targets, closed areas are sometimes implemented to reduce fishing mortality. However, fisheries with stronger management, including rights‐based approaches that c...

Los ecosistemas marino-costeros y la biodiversidad en Cuba sustentan la actividad de alrededor de 10,000 embarcaciones y 50,000 personas relacionadas con la pesca repartidas en cuatro zonas pesqueras . Se pescan invertebrados de alto valor comercial como la langosta y el camarón rosado, junto con más de 50 especies de peces y condrictios de importa...

Fishery managers must often reconcile conflicting estimates of population status and trend. Superensemble models, commonly used in climate and weather forecasting, may provide an effective solution. This approach uses predictions from multiple models as covariates in an additional “superensemble” model fitted to known data. We evaluated the potenti...

This study presents a Monte Carlo method (CMSY) for estimating fisheries reference points from catch, resilience and qualitative stock status information on data-limited stocks. It also presents a Bayesian state-space implementation of the Schaefer production model (BSM), fitted to catch and biomass or catch-per-unit-of-effort (CPUE) data. Special...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) reflect peoples’ physical and cognitive interactions with nature and are increasingly recognised for providing non-material benefits to human societies. Whereas coasts, seas, and oceans sustain a great proportion of the human population, CES provided by these ecosystems have remained largely unexplored. Therefore,...

The U.S. Northeast Continental Shelf marine ecosystem has warmed much faster than the global ocean and it is expected that this enhanced warming will continue through this century. Complex bathymetry and ocean circulation in this region have contributed to biases in global climate model simulations of the Shelf waters. Increasing the resolution of...

Between 2014 and 2016 an interdisciplinary team of researchers including physical oceanographers, biologists, economists, and anthropologists developed a working example of an Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) for three ecologically distinct regions of the Northwest Atlantic; Georges Bank, the Gulf of Maine, and the Grand Banks, as part of the...

The exploitation status of marine fisheries stocks worldwide is of critical importance for food security, ecosystem conservation, and fishery sustainability. Applying a suite of data-limited methods to global catch data, combined through an ensemble modeling approach, we provide quantitative estimates of exploitation status for 785 fish stocks. Fif...

Hundreds of millions of people obtain nutrition and livelihoods from small-scale fisheries, many of which are fully exploited or overexploited. However, we lack a comprehensive approach for analyzing which factors affect management performance. We conducted a literature review of approximately 390 studies to assess drivers of success for different...

Fisheries have had major negative impacts on marine ecosystems, and effective fisheries management and governance are needed to achieve sustainable fisheries, biodiversity conservation goals and thus good ecosystem status. To date, the IndiS-eas programme (Indicators for the Seas) has focussed on assessing the ecological impacts of fishing at the e...

Fisheries management reference points used for stocks in the Northeast Atlantic were investigated as to the appropriateness of their current levels based on three practical limits of exploitation in fisheries management: (i) the smallest sustainable size of the fished stock (SSBpa), (ii) the maximum sustainable rate of exploitation (Fmsy), and (iii...

Many studies illustrate variable patterns in individual species distribution shifts in response to changing temperature. However, an assemblage, a group of species that shares a common environmental niche, will likely exhibit similar responses to climate changes, and these community-level responses may have significant implications for ecosystem fu...

Annual NEFSC bottom trawl survey coverage for the spring. Black dots represent a sampled site in each year. (PDF)

Methodology for observed species shifts versus climate velocity using truncated regressions. (DOCX)

Annual NEFSC bottom trawl survey coverage for the fall. Black dots represent a sampled site in each year. (PDF)

‘Hotspots’ of cluster locations in each region. Red signifies clusters 1N and 1S, blue signifies clusters 2N and 2S, green signifies clusters 3N and 3S, and yellow signifies clusters 4N and 4S. The Gulf of Maine (northern NES) is shown in the top panels, and the Mid-Atlantic Bight/Georges Bank (southern NES) is shown in the bottom panels. Hotspots...

Characterization of the species assemblages derived from the NEFSC bottom trawl survey over four periods (1968–1978, 1979–1989, 1990–2000, and 2001–2012) in three-dimensional space. Assemblages are defined by surface temperature (x-axis), bottom temperature (y-axis), and depth (z-axis) in the Fall (A, B) and Spring (C, D) in the northern (A, C) and...

Latitudinal climate velocities based on a truncated regression. Slopes of observed versus predicted changes in latitude from truncated regressions for the Gulf of Maine (northern NES; a, b) and Mid-Atlantic Bight/Georges Bank (southern NES; c, d) northeast U.S. shelf sampled during spring (a, c) and fall (b, d) bottom trawl surveys. Colors correspo...

Description of the key species in the species clusters defined from the bottom trawl survey. The presence of a ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, or ‘4’ in the columns ‘Spring, South’, ‘Spring, North’, ‘Fall, South’, or ‘Fall, North’ indicates membership of a core species to a particular cluster. An ‘xx’ indicates that the species is present in a given region, but was...

Description of the bottom temperature fields on the NES. Comparison of average bottom temperature fields in the fall on the U.S. Northeast Shelf for an early part of the time series (1977–1987) and a later part of the time series 2000–2010. The bottom panel shows the difference field (late minus early). (PDF)

Percent change in effort by the U.S. otter trawl fishery from 1995 through 2015. Blue (red) colors indicate a decrease (increase) in fishing effort between respective fishing periods. The EEZ is illustrated as a red line and the 200 m isobaths as a light grey line. Black lines illustrate the closed area boundaries. In general fishing effort has dec...

IndiSeas (“Indicators for the Seas”) is a collaborative international working group that was established in 2005 to evaluate the status of exploited marine ecosystems using a suite of indicators in a comparative framework. An initial shortlist of seven ecological indicators was selected to quantify the effects of fishing on the broader ecosystem us...

International and regional policies aimed at managing ocean ecosystem health need quantitative and comprehensive indices to synthesize information from a variety of sources, consistently measure progress, and communicate with key constituencies and the public. Here we present the second annual global assessment of the Ocean Health Index, reporting...

Fisheries provide critical provisioning services, especially given increasing human population. Understanding where marine communities are declining provides an indication of ecosystems of concern and highlights potential conflicts between seafood provisioning from wild fisheries and other ecosystem services. Here we use the nonparametric statistic...

The bush stone-curlew Burhinus grallarius is listed as 'Near threatened' on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. In NSW, bush stone-curlews are listed as 'Endangered' under the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995. The present study focused on bush stone-curlew populations throughout the central coast of NSW and the aim of this study was to...

The Marine Trophic Index (MTI), which tracks the mean trophic level of fishery catches from an ecosystem, generally, but not always, tracks changes in mean trophic level of an ensemble of exploited species in response to fishing pressure. However, one of the disadvantages of this indicator is that declines in trophic level can be masked by geograph...

Trophic level (TL)-based indicators have been widely used to examine fishing impacts in aquatic ecosystems and the induced biodiversity changes. However, much debate has ensued regarding discrepancies and challenges arising from the use of landings data from commercial fisheries to calculate TL indicators. Subsequent studies have started to examine...

Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries contain fish stocks of critical importance for millions of individuals and thousands of fishing communities. These fish stocks harvested by small-scale fisheries (SSF) come from some of the richest and most diverse ecosystems of the world. This emphasizes the need for ecosystem stewardship that can contr...

Stock status is a key parameter for evaluating the sustainability of fishery resources and developing corresponding management plans. However, the majority of stocks are not assessed, often as a result of insufficient data and a lack of resources needed to execute formal stock assessments. The working group involved in this publication focused...

The imperative to increase seafood supply while dealing with its overfished local stocks has pushed the European Union (EU) and its Member States to fish in the Exclusive Economic Zones of other countries through various types of fishing agreements for decades. Although European public fishing agreements are commented on regularly and considered to...

The imperative to increase seafood supply while dealing with its overfished local stocks has pushed the European Union (EU) and its Member States to fish in the Exclusive Economic Zones of other countries through various types of fishing agreements for decades. Although European public fishing agreements are commented on regularly and considered to...

Sustainable provision of seafood from wild-capture fisheries and mariculture is a fundamental component of healthy marine ecosystems and a major component of the Ocean Health Index. Here we critically review the food provision model of the Ocean Health Index, and explore the implications of knowledge gaps, scale of analysis, choice of reference poi...

Meta-analysis has been an integral tool for fisheries researchers since the late 1990s. However, there remain few guidelines for the design, implementation or interpretation of meta-analyses in the field of fisheries. Here, we provide the necessary background for readers, authors and reviewers, including a brief history of the use of meta-analysis...

Research shows that population status can be predicted using catch data, but there is little justification for why these predictions work or how they account for changes in fisheries management. We demonstrate that biomass can be reconstructed from catch data whenever fishing mortality follows predictable dynamics over time (called “effort dynamics...

People value the existence of a variety of marine species and habitats, many of which are negatively impacted by human activities. The Convention on Biological Diversity and other international and national policy agreements have set broad goals for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss. However, efforts to conserve biodiversity cannot be effectiv...

Species richness of assessed species within EEZs. Mean species counts are provided across bands of latitude (1 to 342) and longitude (12 to 458) as a greyed histogram in the margins. (TIF)

Average extinction risk. In our analysis we subtracted the weighted average of extinction risk from 1, and multiplied by 100. An average risk of 100 would mean all species are at Least Concern and a score of 0 would indicate all are Extinct. We did not include extinct species in our analysis, so the lowest possible score is 20 for all being Critica...