Lucia Rueda

• MS Marine Living Resources, University of Massachusetts (USA)
• Instituto Español de Oceanografia

Knowledge of the spatiotemporal behavior and interactions with fishing gear of bycatch species is essential to improve conservation and fisheries management strategies. We analyze fine-scale data from onboard observers, covering 25 fishing fleets from 2002 through 2018, to assess temporal trends and spatial variation in sea turtle bycatch in longli...

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...

Understanding the processes that influence octopus abundance is important in order to manage the fishing grounds and offer advice on the exploitation of this important resource. Fluctuations in abundance of exploited stocks may be due to a great variety of factors. However, in short-lived animals such as cephalopods, in which abundance depends on s...

Overexploitation and climate change are increasingly causing unanticipated changes in marine ecosystems such as higher variability in fish recruitment or shifts in species dominance and distribution that alter the productivity of fish stocks. This study analyses how external and internal drivers influence population dynamics of hake (Merluccius mer...

Long fisheries time series allow the review of baselines and inform our knowledge of past events that have conditioned the recent history of the stocks. In this study, we investigated trends in fisheries landings data for the most representative Atlantic and Mediterranean demersal fisheries off the Spanish Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands...

In marine ecosystems, where variability in the type and availability of food resources is a common property, species must adjust their feeding behaviour in order to fulfil their energetic needs within the requirements of ontogeny. These variations in the quality and quantity of food supply are crucial for the nutritional status of individuals. We h...

Under the Landing Obligation (LO) fishers will need to reduce or land fish that were previously discarded. In this chapter we look at how they might be able to do that by summarising a number of studies conducted in various European regions. We start by describing a series of “challenge” trials where fishers tried to reduce their discards by whatev...

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...

Species inhabiting transitional areas in Large Marine Ecosystems are highly sensitive to climate variations and thus of paramount importance as indicators of ecosystem changes. The spatio-temporal distribution of representative species of the demersal community in the southern Iberian Coastal Large Marine Ecosystem was investigated using time serie...

Describing the spatial patterns of benthic coastal habitats and investigating how those patterns affect the ecology of inhabiting species is a main objective of seascape ecology. Within this emerging discipline spatial scale is a principal topic. Different spatial scales inform on different characteristics of the habitat and therefore the relation...

The cold-water coral (CWC) Dendrophyllia cornigera is widely distributed in areas of both high and low productivity, suggesting a significant trophic plasticity of this coral depending on the food available in the environment. In this study, lipid biomarkers and their isotopic signature were compared in colonies of D. cornigera and sediment from th...

Cephalopods and elasmobranchs are important components of marine ecosystems, whereby knowing the ecological role they play in the structure and dynamics of trophic networks is paramount. With this aim, stomach contents and stable isotopes of the most abundant elasmobranch and cephalopod species (5 and 18 species, respectively) inhabiting deep-sea e...

Aim Marine conservation often prioritizes measures based on ecosystem diversity, missing important information on the size and structure of communities such as that provided by body size‐spectra ( SS ). While most studies have focussed on temporal or spatial patterns of SS , there is no research investigating their spatial heterogeneity, which is a...

The present study examines the influence of fishing, demography and environment on the population parameters of four exploited fish stocks in Iberian Atlantic waters (ICES Divisions VIIIc and IXa): M. merluccius, L. piscatorius, L. boscii and T. trachurus. The objective is to investigate how the above mentioned internal and external forces affect p...

According to their main life history traits, organisms can be arranged in a continuum from fast (species with small body size, short lifespan and high fecundity) to slow (species with opposite characteristics). Life history determines the responses of organisms to natural and anthropogenic factors, as slow species are expected to be more sensitive...

List of GAM and GAMM tested in this study to model population density against environmental parameters (SST, Chla, depth) and fishing exploitation (VMS). The degrees of freedom (df), Akaike Information Criteria (AIC), percentage of deviance explained (%DE) or regression coefficient (R2) and the number of samples (n) are also shown. The best model n...

Fish condition indices can be used as biological indicators of the health of individuals and are influenced by numerous external and internal drivers. Like most essential biological traits, they are very sensitive to the spatial heterogeneity occurring in marine ecosystems, which appears at many observational scales. This brings out different ecolo...

Temporal fluctuation in fish stocks is a natural property of marine populations, which is mainly driven by the intrinsic demographic properties of populations and externally shaped by environmental factors, as well as human impact in harvested species. Understanding such fluctuations is crucial for improving the assessment of exploited marine resou...

The multidisciplinary IDEADOS project funded by the Spanish Government was developed between 2009 and 2012 aiming to determine the relationships between environmental conditions and the nekto-benthic slope communities in two areas of the western Mediterranean, north and south of the Balearic Islands, with different geomorphologic and hydrodynamic c...

Body condition indices are not only often used as reliable indicators of the nutritional status of individuals they can also be utilized to provide insights regarding food availability and habitat quality. The aim of this study was to evaluate the connection between the body condition of the demersal species and the environmental features in the wa...

Monthly catches per unit of effort (CPUE) of adult red shrimp (Aristeus antennatus), reported in the deep water bottom trawl fishery developed on the S\'oller fishing ground off northern Mallorca (Western Mediterranean), and the mean ocean surface vorticity in the surrounding areas are compared between 2000 and 2010. A good correlation is found bet...

The multidisciplinary IDEADOS project funded by the Spanish Government was developed between 2009 and 2012 aiming to determine the relationships between environmental conditions and the nekto-benthic slope communities in two areas of the western Mediterranean, north and south of the Balearic Islands, with different geomorphologic and hydrodynamic c...

The dusky grouper (Epinephelus marginatus) is a key species in Mediterranean rocky reef ecosystems, and it is listed as Endangered. In the Cabrera Archipelago National Park (PNMTAC) the dusky grouper shows high densities in comparison with the rest of the Mediterranean, although the relationship between density values and protection levels within t...

Wind-induced exposure is one of the major forces shaping the geomorphology and biota in coastal areas. The effect of wave exposure on littoral biota is well known in marine environments (Ekebon et al., 2003; Burrows et al., 2008). Ballesteros and Zabala (1993) estimated that such effect decreases exponentially with depth, being more important in th...

The western Mediterranean is an important foraging habitat for the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta). Almost fifty per cent of the juvenile and sub-adult turtles found in the western Mediterranean pelagic foraging grounds originate in nesting beaches along the east coast of U.S., being most of them from the south Florida nesting aggregation. Rece...

Technical Memoranda are used for documentation and timely communication of preliminary results, interim reports, or special-purpose information, and have not received complete formal review, editorial control or detailed editing.