Maintaining and improving water quality is key to the protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems, which provide important benefits to society. In Europe, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) defines water quality based on a set of biological, hydro-morphological and chemical targets, and aims to reach good quality conditions in all river bodies by the year 2027. While recently it has been ...

To understand how fisheries affect parasites, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies that contrasted parasite assemblages in fished and unfished areas. Parasite diversity was lower in hosts from fished areas. Larger hosts had a greater abundance of parasites, suggesting that fishing might reduce the abundance of parasites by selectively removing the largest, most heavily parasitized individual...

There is great need to identify simple yet reliable indicators of fishing effects within the multi-species, multi-gear, data-poor fisheries of the Caribbean. Here, we investigate links between fishing pressure and three simple fish metrics, i.e. average fish weight (an estimate of average individual fish size), fish density and fish biomass, derived from (1) the parrotfish family, a ubiquitous ...

A striking occurrence of the gorgonian coral Ellisella paraplexauroides off the Chafarinas Islands (western Mediterranean) requires serious conservation attention owing to considerable damage initiated by small fishing operations. Although this gorgonian is among the largest Atlantic-Mediterranean invertebrates, its biology remains virtually unknown. The studied population, established within a...

non-commercial fish species of shrimp trawls were studied monthly from october 2005 to september 2006 in mahshahr creeks (darvish, doragh, bihad, ghazaleh, ghanam, zangi and patil). the trawl nets had a cod-end mesh size of 24mm. total catch was 6431 individuals weighing 55.5kg, and included 14 species of non-commercial fish species belonging to 14 families. the caught shrimp species were from ...

This report presents the findings of a study of subsistence salmon fishing on the Togiak River, southwest Alaska, conducted in 1997 and jointly funded by the Division of Subsistence of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the Tog&k National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The study had two primary goals. The first was to document subsistence salmon fishing patterns by Tog...

Industrial fishing has been identified as a cause for life history changes in many harvested stocks, mainly because of the intense fishing mortality and its size-selectivity. Because these changes are potentially evolutionary, we investigate evolutionarily stable life-histories and yield in an energy-allocation state-dependent model for Northeast Arctic cod Gadus morhua. We focus on the evoluti...

Prey flight decisions in response to predation risk are increasingly being considered in conservation and management decisions in the terrestrial realm, but are rarely considered in marine systems. This field-based study investigated how the behavioral response of coral reef fish families varied along a gradient of subsistence fishing pressure in Papua New Guinea. Specifically, we examined how ...

Marine fisheries are highly complex and stochastic. A simulation model, therefore, is required. Simulation-based optimization utilizes the simulation model in obtaining the objective function values of a particular fishing schedule. The decision support system for fishery management will assist the government agencies and the fishing industry to use sound data and management science techniques ...