Sustainable Marine Fisheries Research Articles

Recent developments in building sustainable marine fisheries in China: Reflections on the 2023 Revision of the Marine Environmental Protection Law

As the ocean provides an environmental carrier for fisheries development, sustainable marine fisheries and marine environmental protection are highly synergistic and consistent. Facing traditional and emerging crises such as marine pollution, overfishing and climate change, China revised the Marine Environmental Protection Law in 2023. This article aims to evaluate whether the newly revised Marine Environmental Protection Law effectively responds to crises of sustainable development in marine fisheries and how it contributes to sustainable marine fisheries. The study has found that the 2023 revision enriches and improves China’s legal regimes on marine fisheries from multiple aspects, covering marine environmental supervision, marine ecological protection and the prevention and control of land-based pollution, engineering construction projects pollution, waste dumping pollution, vessel pollution and legal responsibility. The newly revised Marine Environmental Protection Law not only refines the institutional norms and intensifies the legal responsibilities of violations but also improves the systemic nature of the legislation, thus providing stronger legal guarantees for sustainable marine fisheries. However, there are also legislative shortcomings such as unclear connotations of the newly established legal regimes and insufficient response to overfishing and climate change. Nevertheless, China’s newly revised Marine Environmental Protection Law applies the methodology of integrated ecosystem management and comprehensively utilized regulatory measures such as command-and-control tools, honor encouragement and economic incentives to enhance its regulatory effect, also providing implications and insights for addressing the challenges of sustainable marine fisheries on a global scale.

Unseen overlap between fishing vessels and top predators in the northeast Pacific.

Accurate assessments of human-wildlife risk associated with industrial fishing are critical for the conservation of marine top predators. Automatic Identification System (AIS) data provide a means of mapping fishing and estimating human-wildlife risk; however, risk can be obscured by gaps in the AIS record due to technical issues and intentional disabling. We assessed the extent to which unseen fishing vessel activity due to AIS gaps obscured estimates of overlap between fishing vessel activity and 14 marine predators including sharks, tunas, mammals, seabirds, and critically endangered leatherback turtles. Among vessels equipped with AIS in the northeast Pacific, up to 24% of total predator overlap with fishing vessel activity was unseen, and up to 36% was unseen for some individual species. Waters near 10°N had high unseen overlap with sharks yet low reported shark catch, revealing potential discrepancies in self-reported datasets. Accounting for unseen fishing vessel activity illuminates hidden human-wildlife risk, demonstrating challenges and solutions for transparent and sustainable marine fisheries.

Blue transition for sustainable marine fisheries: Critical drivers and evidence from China

Achieving blue transition-sustainable fishery development has become one of the most important concerns for China's blue economy. Blue transition is defined as the transition from fish biomass reduction to biomass recovery of exploited fishery resources through the development of alternative seafood production from aquaculture. Our study examines the “blue transition” between marine fisheries captures and aquaculture production in China and probes the future development trends of China's fisheries under socioeconomic drivers. The results indicate that the resource displacement of the blue transition is not currently underway in China. It predicts a future decline in China's fish production after around 2030, while marine aquaculture products will remain a major component of fish production in the future. Our study adopts an integrated methodology to assess the critical timing of China's blue transition for the first time, and predicts future trends in marine capture fisheries transitions, which can provide recommendations for sustainable transition pathways to achieve SDG14.

A new Merluccius polli reference genome to investigate the effects of global change in West African waters

Genome resources have become crucial to assess genome-wide level of variation as well as to detect adaptive variation. This is particularly important for studying diversity in marine species inhabiting regions highly affected by accelerated climate warming and pollution, also known as global change. A greater awareness of the impacts of global change is urgently needed to ensure sustainable marine fisheries. Despite recent efforts, there are still many gaps in fish reference genomes, both geographical and taxonomic. Here, we sequence, assemble and annotate the genome of Merluccius polli. The total length of this new assembly (~582 Kb, N50 = 168Kb) is approximately 40% longer and much less fragmented than a previous version. Even though it might not be intrinsic of this species, low level of heterozygosity (1.16 SNPs/Kb) and low proportion of repeat content (9.21%) was found in this genome. This hake species has a wide latitudinal distribution; therefore, it is exposed to a changing temperature gradient and to a variety of contaminants in part of its distribution along West African coast. Special emphasis was laid on the identification and characterization of candidate genes known to respond to different stressors (depth, temperature, hypoxia, and heavy metals) happening along its geographical distribution. A total of 68 of the selected candidate genes known to be associated with responses to these stressors were found in the current assembly of the genome, and their predicted sequence can be considered as full-length. Therefore, it is expected that this genome would serve as a tool to further investigations of global change in one of the most stressed marine regions in the planet.

Fish sonar image recognition algorithm based on improved YOLOv5.

Fish stock assessment is crucial for sustainable marine fisheries management in rangeland ecosystems. To address the challenges posed by the overfishing of offshore fish species and facilitate comprehensive deep-sea resource evaluation, this paper introduces an improved fish sonar image detection algorithm based on the you only look once algorithm, version 5 (YOLOv5). Sonar image noise often results in blurred targets and indistinct features, thereby reducing the precision of object detection. Thus, a C3N module is incorporated into the neck component, where depth-separable convolution and an inverse bottleneck layer structure are integrated to lessen feature information loss during downsampling and forward propagation. Furthermore, lowercase shallow feature layer is introduced in the network prediction layer to enhance feature extraction for pixels larger than $ 4 \times 4 $. Additionally, normalized weighted distance based on a Gaussian distribution is combined with Intersection over Union (IoU) during gradient descent to improve small target detection and mitigate the IoU's scale sensitivity. Finally, traditional non-maximum suppression (NMS) is replaced with soft-NMS, reducing missed detections due to occlusion and overlapping fish targets that are common in sonar datasets. Experiments show that the improved model surpasses the original model and YOLOv3 with gains in precision, recall and mean average precision of 2.3%, 4.7% and 2.7%, respectively, and 2.5%, 6.3% and 6.7%, respectively. These findings confirm the method's effectiveness in raising sonar image detection accuracy, which is consistent with model comparisons. Given Unmanned Underwater Vehicle advancements, this method holds the potential to support fish culture decision-making and facilitate fish stock resource assessment.

Network effects in multi-species fisheries.

Managing sustainable marine fisheries is one of the greatest challenges for humanity. The complexity of the issue calls for the development of socio-ecological models and the integration of our knowledge from several disciplines. Here we focus on the ecological aspects of sustainability: how can we increase the catch and, at the same time, possibly decrease negative effects on the marine ecosystem. Coexisting species live in richly interconnected interaction networks. This means that changes in their biomass are caused and may cause various direct and indirect effects on all other coexisting species in the food web. The assessment of maximum sustainable yield values is typically based on single-species analyses, poorly considering this multi-species context. If several fish species are exploited in particular combinations, their effects may not be additive and non-additivity may mean dampening. In these cases, the community response to fishing species A and B together may be smaller than the sum of fishing species A and B separately. We report on some preliminary results on how to develop a network algebra framework for better understanding food web simulation results for pairwise perturbations and their counter-intuitive effects.

Effectiveness Evaluation of Marine Fishery Ecological Sustainable Policy based on Comparative Study

Pei, R., 2020. Effectiveness evaluation of marine fishery ecological sustainable policy based on comparative study. In: Wan, Z. (ed.), Coordinated Sustainable Development in Coastal Areas: Environment and Economy. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 109, pp. 93–99. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.With the current Chinese government's advocacy of sustainable marine fisheries, a series of studies have emerged on the efficiency of China's fishery policy. This paper studied latest measurement indexes and discuss them by comparative method. At present, the three latest pieces of research mainly discuss sustainable measures from three perspectives of economy, ecology, and economic ecological coordination and formed a preliminary evaluation system. These three studies are respectively Sun, Wang, and Su (2020), Han et al. (2020), Ji, Guo, and Zhang (2020). After a comparative study, the deficiencies of previous research are proposed and this work gives the suggestions based on the theoretical framework of social-ecosystem proposed by Ostrom (2009) and the three-dimension theory of exposure -- sensitivity -- coping capacity proposed by Polsky, Neff, and Yarnal (2007).

Towards greater transparency and coherence in funding for sustainable marine fisheries and healthy oceans

This final manuscript in the special issue on “Funding for ocean conservation and sustainable fisheries” is the result of a dialogue aimed at connecting lead authors of the special issue manuscripts with relevant policymakers and practitioners. The dialogue took place over the course of a two-day workshop in December 2018, and this “coda” manuscript seeks to distil thinking around a series of key recurring topics raised throughout the workshop. These topics are collected into three broad categories, or “needs”: 1) a need for transparency, 2) a need for coherence, and 3) a need for improved monitoring of project impacts. While the special issue sought to collect new research into the latest trends and developments in the rapidly evolving world of funding for ocean conservation and sustainable fisheries, the insights collected during the workshop have helped to highlight remaining knowledge gaps. Therefore, each of the three “needs” identified within this manuscript is followed by a series of questions that the workshop participants identified as warranting further attention as part of a future research agenda. The crosscutting nature of many of the issues raised as well as the rapid pace of change that characterizes this funding landscape both pointed to a broader need for continued dialogue and study that reaches across the communities of research, policy and practice.

Fiscal reforms for sustainable marine fisheries governance: Delivering the SDGs and ensuring no one is left behind

Governments adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at ushering in a new era of sustainable development where ‘no one is left behind.’ They include a specific goal — SDG 14 — to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources. While policymakers can use a number of legal, regulatory and economic tools to do so, there should be more focus on harnessing fiscal instruments such as taxes, subsidies and conditional transfers to provide the necessary incentives. Provided these approaches strike an appropriate balance between economic, social and ecological considerations, they could play an important role in making SDG 14 a reality. It must be noted that fiscal instruments or reforms do not operate in a vacuum. Their effective implementation requires adequate institutional frameworks to be in place. It is argued that (i) building or strengthening both technical and institutional capacity for fiscal administration; (ii) enhancing compliance through either (or a combination of) incentives and/or punitive measures; (iii) promoting transparency and accountability to win legitimacy and thereby cooperation from all stakeholders involved; and (iv) clearly defining use and access rights of marine and coastal resources either by recognising traditional or customary rights or through a participatory and equitable approach are very critical for an effective implementation of fiscal instruments their reforms.

Introduction: Social and cultural impacts of marine fisheries

The livelihoods and way of life of fishing communities globally are increasingly threatened as they struggle to cope with dwindling fish stocks and an increasing regulatory regime. However, the social and cultural aspects of marine fisheries are often overlooked in fisheries policy and management frameworks that focus on the biological and economic impacts of fishing in their efforts to halt the decline in key stocks. While this is understandable, sustainable fisheries are only likely to be achieved if management approaches integrate environmental, economic and social dimensions. In order to address this, and to explore conceptual and governance issues relating to the management of sustainable marine fisheries, an international conference entitled It's Not Just About the Fish was held in London in April 2011. This introductory paper provides a summary of the themes addressed and briefly describes the thirteen papers which comprise this Special Issue of Marine Policy. It is concluded that progress is starting to be made to address the important socio-cultural impacts of marine fishing on coastal communities worldwide. However, the challenge for researchers and policy makers is to work together to develop methodologies that allow the social and cultural values of marine fisheries to be fully accounted for and integrated into fisheries and marine policy.

Functional responses and scaling in predator-prey interactions of marine fishes: contemporary issues and emerging concepts

Predator-prey interactions are a primary structuring force vital to the resilience of marine communities and sustainability of the world's oceans. Human influences on marine ecosystems mediate changes in species interactions. This generality is evinced by the cascading effects of overharvesting top predators on the structure and function of marine ecosystems. It follows that ecological forecasting, ecosystem management, and marine spatial planning require a better understanding of food web relationships. Characterising and scaling predator-prey interactions for use in tactical and strategic tools (i.e. multi-species management and ecosystem models) are paramount in this effort. Here, we explore what issues are involved and must be considered to advance the use of predator-prey theory in the context of marine fisheries science. We address pertinent contemporary ecological issues including (1) the approaches and complexities of evaluating predator responses in marine systems; (2) the 'scaling up' of predator-prey interactions to the population, community, and ecosystem level; (3) the role of predator-prey theory in contemporary fisheries and ecosystem modelling approaches; and (4) directions for the future. Our intent is to point out needed research directions that will improve our understanding of predator-prey interactions in the context of the sustainable marine fisheries and ecosystem management.

ANALISIS MUSIM PENANGKAPAN IKAN TERI (Stolephorus sp.) DI TELUK DODINGA, KABUPATEN HALMAHERA BARAT

Fisheries should be a sustainable economic activity in order to maintain its services in the future. Sustainable marine fisheries resources exploitation requires a utilization rate lower than the resources availability. Therefore, the exploitation rate should not achieve the recovery ability of the resources in any particular period. In fishing activities, for instance, there is a guideline not to catch fish over the Total Allowable Catch (TAC), 80% of the MSY value. The exploitation rate of the anchovy (Stolephorus sp.) in Dodinga Bay was still low. It could result from small-scaled traditional fishermen and low fishing distance from the shore. Their income was also low due to high operational cost and fluctuation in fish price. To improve the fishermen prosperity, it is necessary to raise the fishing productivity and the efficiency of production input utilization on the boat lift net. This study focused on understanding the anchovy fishing season of the boat lift net in Dodinga Bay to analyze the yearly fishing seasons for the last five years. Results concluded that the fishing season of the anchovy (Stolephorus sp.) in Dodinga Bay could be separated into two phases, March to June and October to November, but the former was more extensive and lager in scale than the later.

Sustainability of Marine Resources: Fisheries Utilization

The Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable (SWRR) is one of several natural resource roundtables with government, corporate, and NGO participation. SWRR has been a subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) since 2001, and operates under authority of OMB M-92-01 and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The purpose of the Roundtable is to provide an open forum for exchanging ideas and information to foster collaboration on ways to manage water resources in such a way that the resource and its uses may be sustained over the long term. Four earlier papers in this series described work leading up to the completion of the 2005 Preliminary Report. The present paper breaks new ground, and represents a challenge to the traditional disciplines of civil and sanitary engineering. Here we address the problem of sustainable marine fisheries, as exemplified by the work of the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Marine Stewardship Council. This is a new challenge that we begin to address by examining the idea of developing indicators for commercial fisheries resources. The goal is to help policy makers balance the economic benefits of commercial fisheries against the exhaustion of a finite resource of creatures that dwell in water. This “blue water” approach serves to connect creatures that dwell in water with the important economic benefits they bring to us all. The journey toward Sustainable Water Resources Management begins by determining the most important water issues and indicators. The long-term goals of SWRR include the development of principles, criteria and indicators to support decision-making and identification of opportunities for collaboration on research needs. Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable participants are committed to interdisciplinary, inter-jurisdictional, and cross-ownership collaboration that identifies and supports national, state, and fieldlevel activities to sustain water resources.

Is there a role for ecologists in an ecosystem approach to the management of marine resources?

Is there a role for ecologists in an ecosystem approach to the management of marine resources?

Sustaining Marine Fisheries

Journal of Environmental QualityVolume 29, Issue 5 p. 1719-1719 Book Review Sustaining Marine Fisheries Committee on Ecosystem Management for Sustainable Marine Fisheries. Ocean Studies Board. Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources, National Research Council Press, 2101 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC. 1999. 164 p. $42.95. ISBN 0-309-05526-1 Charles F. Cole, Charles F. Cole Professor Emeritus ccole2@columbus.rr.com The Ohio State University, Columbus, MASearch for more papers by this author Charles F. Cole, Charles F. Cole Professor Emeritus ccole2@columbus.rr.com The Ohio State University, Columbus, MASearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 September 2000 https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq2000.00472425002900050047xCitations: 2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume29, Issue5September‐October 2000Pages 1719-1719 RelatedInformation

ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE MARINE FISHERIES1

Human societies have caused large-scale modifications of the landscape and observed the ecosystem consequences of these changes for centuries. Natural terrestrial ecosystems have been greatly altered through the actions of humans by grazing, agriculture, forestry, and urbanization. Natural populations have been fragmented and their numbers reduced. Natural forests have been turned into grasslands or crops, and shrublands in many cases have expanded. Species have been driven to extinction. The results of these actions through time are easily seen and quantified, and thus surprises are few, although the interannual variability of climate and outbreaks of diseases and invasive pests can cause deviations from expectations and hence local hardships. With ocean ecosystems our powers of direct observation are much more limited. Everything takes place out of view, and so our knowledge of what organisms are present, how many there are, and how they interact is, in general, rather fragmentary. Surprises are to be expected. The apparent large-scale crashes of many fisheries of the world did indeed come as a surprise to most. What seemed like an unlimited source of diverse protein all of sudden seemed quite limited, and in fact the long-term sustainability of many fish stocks appeared threatened. These events led to considerable social disruption within the fishing industry and an intense questioning of fishery practices. This special volume contributes to the reexamination process. The papers that follow were associated with an international meeting on the state of fisheries that was held in Monterey, California, in February 1996, sponsored by the U.S. National Research Council's Ocean Study Board. These papers were an element of the discussions that provided input to the National Research Council's study on an ecosystem approach to the management of marine ecosystems. These papers do not form the full substance of the debate, but they do give some recent thinking on a number of important issues of this complex problem. The initial papers treat the basic nature of marine ecosystems and how they have been influenced by changes in the environment and by fishing practices. The bulk of the issue deals with a series of management options for fisheries, including marine reserves, new approaches for setting fishing limits based on population sizes, and quota systems, as well as new economic incentives for managing fisheries. Some of these approaches are speculative, and others have already proved that they work under the conditions outlined. What is clear is that the problem is complex. We have not yet attempted to manage fisheries in an ecosystem context. These papers are a contribution toward this goal. However, it is evident that even if we fully understood the nature and dynamics of marine ecosystems we still would not be able to manage them successfully without full consideration of the social, political, and economic drivers of the fishing industry. Science has a large role to play in defining and understanding sustainability. Making it happen though is a societal challenge. This special issue owes a particular thanks to Mary Hope Katsouros who was responsible for initiating this endeavor. Others who have helped along the way are William Merrell, Edward Urban, Lora Taylor, and Louis Pitelka. The National Academy Press will be publishing the associated report of the Ocean Studies Board's Committee on Ecosystem Management of Sustainable Marine Fisheries, and the members of the committee are reported there. Their efforts have been crucial throughout this endeavor. Finally, I thank David Policansky, who has provided outstanding input into the forthcoming National Research Council's report. I would also like to thank the National Research Council and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for their support of this project.