Sophie Gourguet

• PhD
• Researcher at Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer

Fisheries bycatch is one of the biggest threats to marine mammal populations and an important conservation and management problem worldwide. Conventional marine mammal bycatch mitigation approaches typically rely on top-down, command-and-control regulations that often fail to create desired incentives for fishers to avoid bycatch. There is growing...

The Working Group on Economics (WGECON) was established to address the challenge of bringing fisheries economics into ICES science and advice, with the growing recognition that this can facilitate the understanding of marine ecosystem uses, their drivers and responses to changes, and assessment and communication of trade-offs that include economic,...

Stakeholder engagement (SkE) in research is currently experiencing significant growth within the fields of environmental and sustainability sciences. Stakeholder engagement ensures the relevance of research questions to societal expectations and the uptake and salience of the co‐produced knowledge and results for their use in the decision‐making pr...

Reconciling food security, economic development and biodiversity conservation in the face of global changes is a major challenge. The sustainable uses of marine biodiversity in the context of climate change, invasive species, water pollution and demographic growth is an example of this bio-economic challenge. There is a need for quantitative method...

Depredation can broadly affect marine socio-ecological systems, yet it has been little studied via modelling approaches. Here we used qualitative mathematical modelling of system feedback (Puccia and Levins’ loop analysis) and a system of ordinary differential equations to represent major interactions between a fishery, an exploited stock and a dep...

The Mediterranean fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) subpopulation is under threat from collisions with ships. Given the international dimension of the issue, the French, Italian, Monegasque and Spanish governments have proposed a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA), i.e., a management zone of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), in whi...

While the science supporting fisheries management has generally been dominated by the natural sciences, there has been a growing recognition that managing fisheries essentially means managing economic systems. Indeed, over the past seven decades, economic ideas and insights have increasingly come to play a role in fisheries management and policy. A...

This publication is a Science for Policy report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Comm...

Understanding the underlying trade-offs in fisheries and marine social-ecological systems is important in designing effective policies and management interventions. The social aspects of fishing are often overlooked-especially in the context of trade-off analyses provided to help decision makers to manage fisheries sustainably. This paper presents...

Environmentally driven changes in small pelagic fish condition and size have been observed in the Gulf of Lions (GOL) since 2008, leading to a significant fishery crisis. However, the effect of changes in environment and/or in the small pelagic community on the demersal community remain unknown. For the first time, this study examines the body cond...

Collisions between ships and whales can pose a significant threat to the survival of some whale populations. The lack of robust and holistic assessments of the consequences of mitigation solutions often leads to poor compliance from the shipping industry. To overcome this, several papers support a regulatory approach to the management of whale-ship...

Assessing the sustainability of socio-ecological systems requires understanding the interactions between numerous ecological, economic and social components. Models are often used to investigate how interactions shape system feedbacks and drive the complex dynamics at play in such systems. However, building these models is a non-trivial exercise, w...

Human activities can significantly impact ecosystem functioning. While harvesting negatively impacts target resources, it can also provide additional food sources to non-target wildlife. In response to fisheries expansion in the marine environment, certain predator species have developed the ability to feed on fisheries catches. This new behaviour,...

Human activities can significantly impact ecosystem functioning. While harvesting negatively impacts target resources, it can also provide additional food sources to non-target wildlife. In response to fisheries expansion in the marine environment, certain predator species have developed the ability to feed on fisheries catches. This new behaviour,...

The sustainable mitigation of human–wildlife conflicts has become a major societal and environmental challenge globally. Among these conflicts, large marine predators feeding on fisheries catches, a behaviour termed “depredation,” has emerged concomitantly with the expansion of the world’s fisheries. Depredation poses threats to both the socio‐econ...

Depredation, i.e. the partial or complete removal of caught fish from fishing gear by marine mammals, is attracting more and more attention from fisheries managers and society in general due to the growing concerns about the conservation of marine mammals' populations and Human-Wildlife interactions in general. This short background paper presents...

Ecosystem-based approaches are increasingly used in fisheries management to account for the direct trophic impacts of fish population harvesting. However, fisheries can also indirectly alter ecosystem structure and functioning, for instance via the provision of new feeding opportunities to marine predators. For instance, marine depredation, where p...

Marine and coastal activities are closely interrelated, and conflicts among different sectors can undermine management and conservation objectives. Governance systems for fisheries, power generation, irrigation, aquaculture, marine biodiversity conservation, and other coastal and maritime activities are typically organized to manage conflicts withi...

Avoiding whinges from various and potentially conflicting stakeholders is a major challenge for sustainable development and for the identification of sustainability scenarios or policies for biodiversity and ecosystem services. It turns out that independently complying with whinge thresholds and constraints of these stakeholders is not sufficient b...

It is increasingly evident that climate change is having significant impacts on marine ecosystems and dependent fisheries. Yet, translating climate science into management actions and policies is an ongoing challenge. In particular, four aspects have confounded implementation of climate-resilient management: (i) regional management tools may not be...

This rich 24-pages summary (attached) provides a synthetic overview of a Monograph of 218 pages, abundantly illustrated and documented, which explores the complexity of interactions between the marine researchers, fishermen, and marine resources. While biodiversity is widely (and naturally) regarded as favorable for human populations, it is also...

This paper examines the impact of climate change on the bio-economic performance of Bay of Biscay mixed fisheries and explores the capacity of alternative management strategies to cope with these impacts. A dynamic multi-species, multi-class, multi-fleet model is developed and calibrated using available biological, economic and environmental inform...

Marine ecosystems evolve under many interconnected and area-specific pressures. To fulfil society's intensifying and diversifying needs while ensuring ecologically sustainable development, more effective marine spatial planning and broader-scope management of marine resources is necessary. Integrated ecological–economic fisheries models (IEEFMs) of...

viter la contestation d'acteurs aux objectifs divers et parfois contradictoires est un défi majeur pour le développement durable et pour l'identification de politique pour la biodiversité et les services éco-systémiques. De plus, respecter les seuils d'acceptation des différents acteurs indépendamment n'est pas suffisant parce que des interactions,...

Reconciling food security, economic development and biodiversity conservation is a key challenge, especially in the face of the demographic transition characterizing many countries in the world. Fisheries and marine ecosystems constitute a difficult application of this bio-economic challenge. Many experts and scientists advocate an ecosystem approa...

According to the European Common Fisheries Policy (Regulation (EU) No 1380/2013), the objective of sustainable exploitation of marine biological resources is more effectively achieved through a multiannual approach to fisheries management, and hence multi-annual plans reflecting the specificities of different fisheries shall be adopted as a priorit...

Fisheries management must address multiple, often conflicting objectives in a highly uncertain context. In particular, while the bio-economic performance of trawl fisheries is subject to high levels of biological and economic uncertainty, the impact of trawling on broader biodiversity is also a major concern for their management. The purpose of thi...

Terrestrial and marine biodiversity provides the basis for both ecosystems functioning and numerous commodities or services that underpin human well-being. From several decades, alarming trends have been reported worldwide for both biodiversity and ecosystem services. Therefore the sustainable management of biodiversity requires a double viewpoint...

Empirical evidence and the theoretical literature both point to stock sustainability and the protection of marine biodiversity as important fisheries management issues. Decision-support tools are increasingly required to operationalize the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management. These tools need to integrate (i) ecological and socio-econo...

This paper offers a theoretical and empirical modeling for ecosystem-based fishery management (EBFM). A multi-species and multi-fleets model integrating Lokta-Volterra trophic dynamics and profit functions is developed for the coastal fishery of French Guiana. This small-case fishery constitutes a challenging example with high fish biodiversity, se...

Management of fisheries for sustainability requires dealing with multiple and often conflicting objectives. A stochastic viability approach is proposed to address the trade-offs associated with balancing ecological, economic and social objectives in regulating mixed fisheries, taking into account the complexity and uncertainty of the dynamic intera...

This paper offers a theoretical and empirical model of ecosystem-based fishery management. A multi-species and multi-fleet model integrating Lotka–Volterra trophic dynamics as well as production and profit assessments is developed and applied to the coastal fishery of French Guiana. This small-scale fishery constitutes a challenging example with hi...

Academia and management agencies show a growing interest for ecosystem-based fishery management (EBFM). However, the way to operationalize this approach remains challenging. The present paper illustrates how the concepts of stochastic co-viability, which accounts for dynamic complexities, uncertainties, risk and sustainability constraints, can be u...