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Introduction
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Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO, CSIC)
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- Senior Researcher
Publications
Publications (179)
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...
Large‐scale biodiversity assessments and conservation applications require integrated and up‐to‐date datasets across regions. In the oceans, monitoring is fragmented, which affects knowledge exchange and usage. Among existing monitoring programs, scientific bottom‐trawl surveys (SBTS) are long‐term, rich, and well‐maintained data sources at the sca...
Introduction
The identification of recruitment areas and other essential fish habitats of exploited stocks is a fundamental requirement for the development of marine spatial planning and ecosystem conservation measures. Reducing recruitment mortality is particularly relevant on the northern continental shelf of the Iberian Peninsula and is one of t...
FISHGLOB brings together experts in, and users of, fish monitoring data to support biodiversity research and conservation across oceans.
Tracking changes in the stability of low-abundance populations is vital for conservation. While the stability of natural populations is often assessed based on linear dynamics, many exhibit state-dependent dynamics, such as the iconic Atlantic cod in the North Sea (Gadus morhua). This fish population experienced an abrupt decline in the year 2000 a...
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...
Aim
Overexploitation of wildlife and anthropogenic climate change are key drivers of global biodiversity loss. Investigating how these stressors interact and affect ecosystems is critical for conservation efforts. Following trait‐based vulnerability assessments, we propose two community‐level sensitivity indicators: climate change (SCC) and fishing...
Identifying Four-spot megrim (Lepidorhombus boscii) recruitment areas and their spatiotemporal variability using a Bayesian model is essential since they are considered essential habitats. Furthermore, including this information can improve the current stock assessment model.
The Alboran Sea is the westernmost sub-basin of the Mediterranean Sea, and it is connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar. The Alboran Ridge is located in the middle of the Alboran Sea and represents a hotspot of biodiversity in the Mediterranean Sea. Besides their critical importance, there are few studies on the communities...
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...
This report presents the main findings of the “Transboun- dary population structure of sardine, European hake and blackspot seabream in the Alboran Sea and adjacent wa- ters” (Transboran) research project, which was carried out under the framework of the FAO regional project Cope- Med II and in close collaboration with the GFCM. The project applied...
Climate change is triggering shifts in species distribution eventually altering communities' biogeography. The composition of a community in terms of its species' ecological niche informs of a community's response to environmental conditions and impacts, which is central for a timely conservation. While the thermal niche has been widely explored, g...
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...
The Western Mediterranean fisheries significantly contribute to the regional blue
economy, despite evidence of ongoing, widespread overexploitation of stocks. Understanding the spatial distribution and population dynamics of species is crucial for
comprehending fisheries dynamics combining local and regional scales, although the
underlying processe...
The Mediterranean Sea is one of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world due to the variety and severity of cumulative impacts faced, including high climate risk. Species distributions are expected to track climate niches in response to warming, with meridionalization (i.e. northern spread of native warm-water species) as a common documented res...
Ocean warming and acidification, decreases in dissolved oxygen concentrations, and changes in primary production are causing an unprecedented global redistribution of marine life. The identification of underlying ecological processes underpinning marine species turnover, particularly the prevalence of increases of warm-water species or declines of...
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...
Accounting for marine stocks spatiotemporal complexity has become one of the most pressing improvements that should be added to the new generation of stock assessment. Disentangling persistent and dynamic population subcomponents and understanding their main drivers of variation are still stock-specific challenges. Here, we hypothesized that the sp...
We present the Terms of Reference for a case study on a Mediterranean eco-region focusing on the environmental component of the Ecosystem Report Card. The objective of this case study is to describe and monitor the variability of environmental processes in the Mediterranean Sea that affect the ecology of large pelagic fishes, with a particular atte...
Human pressures are causing significant changes on marine ecosystem functioning. In particular, it is well known that fishing pressure strongly alters the food webs’ structure, disrupting the energy flow through marine ecosystems and reducing the network complexity by simplifying trophic interactions. It is therefore necessary to monitor the loss o...
Simple Summary
The response of marine fish species to external pressures highly depends on their intrinsic bio-ecological traits. Among those species of commercial interest, the deep-water Blackspot Seabream (Pagellus bogaraveo, Brünnich 1768) inhabits a large geographical range, a condition that might contribute to high resilience to fishing activ...
The Workshop on pathways to climate-aware advice (WKCLIMAD) met in the autumn of 2021 to develop a proposal for an advisory framework that accounts for the influences of climate change on aquaculture, fisheries, and ecosystems. The workshop worked through online ses-sions with over 40 participants.
Climate-informed advice should be provided through...
Spatial distribution of characteristic population parameters (density, biomass and mean size) of Chamelea gallina were analyzed from systematic survey data applying a geostatistical approach in the Gulf of Cádiz (SW Spain). The influence of static (depth and distance to inland outflows), dynamic (sediment and water column features) environmental va...
Small pelagic fish (SPF) are fundamental components of marine food webs and are subject to boom and bust periods ascribed to the interactive effects of fishing and climate, which vary depending on species' demography and life-history traits and determine the signal that we observe in fisheries time series. However, it is poorly understood how the b...
The objective of WKFISHDISH2 was to develop a standardized and open-source way of routinely using trawl survey data to produce distribution maps which can be easily updated. To do so, workshop participants (i) reviewed models that can produce distribution maps from survey data in DATRAS and MEDITS formats, (ii) considered best practice guidance for...
The objective of WKFISHDISH2 was to develop a standardized and open-source way of routinely using trawl survey data to produce distribution maps which can be easily updated. To do so, workshop participants (i) reviewed models that can produce distribution maps from survey data in DATRAS and MEDITS formats, (ii) considered best practice guidance for...
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...
Ensuring an economically viable, sustainable and low CO2 emission extractive fishery is critical in order to achieve the life below water UN sustainable development goals and the climate change commitments of Paris agreement. This challenge is even more relevant in the most overexploited region of the world: The Mediterranean Sea. Here, we use the...
Among the main measures adopted to reduce anthropogenic impacts on elasmobranch communities, understanding the ecology of deep-sea sharks is of paramount importance, especially for potentially vulnerable species highly represented in the bycatch composition of commercial fisheries such as the blackmouth catshark Galeus melastomus. In the present wo...
The Mediterranean Sea is among the most vulnerable semi-enclosed seas to climate change. Multiple oceanic changes occur besides warming that can generate numerous ecological, social and economic risks, challenging fisheries management at various spatial scales – from local to international. In this study, we applied a semi-quantitative climate risk...
Large-scale climatic indices are extensively used as predictors of ecological processes, but the mechanisms and the spatio-temporal scales at which climatic indices influence these processes are often speculative. Here, we use long-term data to evaluate how a measure of individual breeding investment (the egg volume) of three long-lived and long-di...
This study analyses the samples collected annually (2012 to 2018) on circalittoral and bathyal soft bottoms (30 to 800 m) by the MEDITS surveys in the northern Alboran Sea (including Alboran Island) and the Gulf of Vera to determine the composition, structure and distribution of decapod crustacean assemblages. A total of 94 decapod crustacean speci...
To effectively future-proof the management of the European Union fishing fleets we have explored a suite of case studies encompassing the northeast and tropical Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black Seas. This study shows that European Union (EU) fisheries are likely resilient to climate-driven short-term stresses, but may be negatively imp...
In the framework of global human-induced change, marine communities’ often respond to changing conditions abruptly reorganizing into new equilibria. These shifts are difficult to predict and often imply irreversible adjustments due to hysteresis. Unraveling the role of the forces leading regime shifts is a major challenge. We explored the temporal...
The European COST Action “Unifying Approaches to Marine Connectivity for improved Resource Management for the Seas” (SEA-UNICORN, 2020‐2025) is an international research coordination initiative that unites an interdisciplinary community of scientists and policymakers from over 100 organizations across Europe and beyond. It is establishing a globall...
The blackspot seabream (Pagellus bogaraveo) is a benthopelagic fish species highly appreciated by consumers and an important target of the Spanish and Moroccan fisheries in the transcontinental waters of the Strait of Gibraltar area. It is also one of the most exploited resources of the region, which has led to a situation of overexploitation and a...
Understanding how the surface dynamics of the ocean influence the spawning and larval ecology of many large pelagic species, in particular tuna species, is a major challenge. For temperate tunas, the selection of geographically restricted spawning grounds is influenced by environmental conditions, but the influence of surface mixing properties on t...
El Libro Blanco de la Alimentación Sostenible en España, realizado por la Fundación Alternativas y la Fundación Carasso, identifica y propone las principales claves para lograr una transición hacia sistemas alimentarios sostenibles y resilientes. Este objetivo se plasma en cada uno de los 13 capítulos temáticos que componen el volumen, a través de...
The global response to the challenge of increasingly rapid and severe climate change is shifting from a focus on mitigation and remediation of impacts to a pragmatic adaptation framework. Innovative adaptive solutions that transform the way in which we manage the world's oceans and, particularly, the harvesting of marine resources in a sustainable...
The Mediterranean Sea is a large marine ecosystem with high heterogeneity in both environmental and ecological characteristics. It presents clear gradients from north to south and west to east. It is also an important area in terms of biodiversity and conservation of vulnerable species, and it suffers from several cumulative human impacts, such as...
Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_FinalDraft_Chapter03.pdf
Understanding how pollination services can be maintained in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes is a current challenge for basic and applied ecology. The stability of plant–pollinator communities might increase in heterogeneous landscapes with a high diversity of species and alternative habitats, both through larger independent fluctuations of po...
The Gulf of Cadiz (GoC) in the Atlantic Ocean and the Alboran Sea (AS) in the Mediterranean Sea are part of an oceanographic complex system of extreme importance in the exchange of waters between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar. Besides its significant role as ecological transition system, it is unknown whether re...
Ecological resilience has become a conceptual cornerstone bridging ecological processes to conservation needs. Global change is increasingly associated with local changes in environmental conditions that can cause abrupt ecosystem reorganizations attending to system‐specific resilience fluctuations with time (i.e. resilience dynamics).
Here we asse...
Characterising the network of trophic interactions in complex biological communities is one of the grand challenges of community and ecosystem ecology. These networks are commonly constructed based on the potential interactions among consumer and resource species pairs, however, empirical studies evidence that feeding interactions do not always tak...
The unlimited economic growth that fuels capitalism's metabolism has profoundly transformed a large portion of Earth. The resulting environmental destruction has led to an unprecedented rate of biodiversity loss. Following large‐scale losses of habitats and species, it was recognized that biodiversity is crucial to maintaining functional ecosystems...
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...
Regional differences in climate vulnerability are particularly important in many countries with socio-ecological gradients or geographical and environmental spatial segregation. Many studies are regularly performed at the national level, but regional assessments can provide more detailed information and important insights into intra-national vulner...
Over the continental slope, submarine canyons and scarps are oceanographically dynamic environments, promoting higher productivity than adjacent areas and giving rise to feeding grounds for a suite of predators from different feeding guilds. As high trophic level demersal predators forage, they contribute to coupling benthic and pelagic production...
In the framework of global human-induced change, one of marine communities’ many known responses to shifting external conditions is that of abruptly reorganizing into new intricate equilibrium. The occurrence of shifts in complex systems has proven to be quite challenging to predict and in many cases, implies irreversible adjustments due to hystere...
This chapter revises biogeophysical issues of connectivity processes for fish populations in the Alboran Sea—Strait of Gibraltar—Gulf of Cadiz area. Connectivity of early life history stages between distant spawning grounds is crucial to incorporate vital developmental rates that condition survival probabilities at critical ontogenic stages. Hydrod...
On 22 December 2019, the world of fisheries science and whale conservation lost one of its most ardent champions with the passing of Sidney J. Holt. His career began in 1947 at the age of 21. Ten years later, he and his colleague Ray Beverton published their authoritative monograph on quantitative fish population dynamics. In 1953, he joined the Fi...
Seascape ecology, the marine-centric counterpart to landscape ecology, is rapidly emerging as an interdisciplinary and spatially explicit ecological science with relevance to marine management, biodiversity conservation and restoration. While important progress in this field has been made in the past decade, there has been no coherent prioritisatio...
Temperature is often an important variable influencing the vertical position of fish larvae in the water column. The same species may show different vertical distributions in areas with a strong near-surface seasonal thermocline compared to isothermal near-surface regions. In areas with a strong surface thermocline, tuna larvae show a significant p...
This third edition of the State of Mediterranean and Black Sea Fisheries provides a comprehensive overview of the status of fisheries in the region, looking at their main features and trends, in order to better inform their management and better examine current and future challenges that they will face in the near future. The aim of this report is...
Under current levels of global warming most demersal species in the Northeast Atlantic are experiencing tropicalization, meridionalization or borealization of their distributions, leading to profound changes in demersal communities. We explore these changes using the Community Weighted Mean Temperature (CWMT), an index to link the thermal reference...
Marine biota are redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of...
Marine biota is redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of d...
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...
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...
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 present study provides updated information on the occurrence, abundance and biomass distribution patterns and length frequencies of Merluccius merluccius in the Mediterranean Sea, by analysing a time series of data from the Mediterranean International Trawl Surveys (MEDITS) from 1994 to 2015. The highest values of abundance and biomass were obs...
A fundamental challenge in ecology is to understand why species are found where they are and predict where they are likely to occur in the future. Trait-based approaches may provide such understanding, because it is the traits and adaptations of species that determine which environments they can inhabit. It is therefore important to identify key tr...
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...
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...
The phytoplankton community composition, structure, and biomass were investigated under stratified and oligotrophic conditions during summer for three consecutive years in the Mediterranean Sea. Our results reveal that the phytoplankton community structure was strongly influenced by vertical stratification. The thermocline separated two different p...
Marine resources stewardships are progressively becoming more receptive to an effective incorporation of both ecosystem and environmental complexities into the analytical frameworks of fisheries assessment. Understanding and predicting marine fish production for spatially and demographically complex populations in changing environmental conditions...
The present study describes for the first time the spatial distribution of five macrourid species throughout the Mediterranean Sea and analyses depth, geographical and time-related trends regarding their abundance, biomass and mean fish weight. The data were collected as part of the MEDITS annual bottom trawl survey carried out by several European...
In this manuscript, we test how an understanding of geographical variation in larval fitness in relation to temperature and habitat use could be a useful method to improve our understanding of recruitment and develop better indices of annual recruitment. On the basis of the assumption that growth and survival of tuna larvae are influenced by temper...
Recent estimates suggest that the mesopelagic zone could contain a total fish biomass of 2-19.5 gigatonnes, roughly equivalent to 100 times the annual catch of all existing fisheries. In addition to the possibility of direct consumption of mesopelagic species, there is interest in their use for fishmeal, as a source of dietary supplements for human...
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...
The study of environmental variables and their influence on the small pelagic fish stocks of the Alboran Sea (Western Mediterranean) is asymmetrical, with studies focused on the southern coast being scarce compared with those looking at the northern margin. In this work, time series of sardine landings from the Moroccan coast of the Alboran Sea fro...
