Abstract
Climate change is expected to influence spatial and temporal distributions of fish stocks. The aim of this paper is to compare climate change impact on a fishery with other factors impacting the performance of fishing fleets. The fishery in question is the Northeast Arctic cod fishery, a well-documented fishery where data on spatial and temporal distributions are available. A cellular automata model is developed for the purpose of mimicking possible distributional patterns and different management alternatives are studied under varying assumptions on the fleets’ fishing aptitude. Fisheries management and fishing aptitude, also including technological development and local knowledge, turn out to have the greatest impact on the spatial distribution of the fishing effort, when comparing the IPCC’s SRES A1B scenario with repeated sequences of the current environmental situation over a period of 45 years. In both cases, the highest profits in the simulation period of 45 years are obtained at low exploitation levels and moderate fishing aptitude.
Highlights
It is difficult to predict future development of Arctic marine ecosystems and, even more so, how these are affected by human interactions
While the previous studies focused on the problems of identifying impacts climate change may have on the Barents Sea cod fishery, this paper provides a comparative study of a selected climate scenario and a zero scenario where no climate effects are considered
The fleet dynamics is in all simulations controlled as described above, inducing a total fleet capacity which may be larger or equal to the active fleet E: V ! E
Summary
It is difficult to predict future development of Arctic marine ecosystems and, even more so, how these are affected by human interactions Immediate effects of such interactions are functions of the level and profile of the human. Long-term effects are by nature more difficult to predict than short-term perturbations, being functions of previous interactions and poorly known dynamics causing variations in spatial and temporal distributions of the system. This describes the complexity of a marine ecosystem in its natural state, including the environmental variation which may occur within the natural sample space of the system (often referred to as natural variation). A dramatic change in the sample space of the system may be referred to as an ecosystem shift (Scheffer et al 2001)
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