After the collapse of herring and cod stocks in the western Baltic Sea, flatfish such as plaice, flounder, and dab now dominate the catch. However, they can’t replace the lost catch of cod and herring. Photo by Ilka Thomsen, GEOMAR.
As the abundance of global fish populations continues to deteriorate, top fisheries researchers are calling for simpler yet more accurate stock assessment models that avoid overly optimistic scientific advice, which ends up encouraging overfishing.
Rainer Froese. Photo by the Blue Marine Foundation, Facebook.
By Rainer Froese
I thought the background story of our recent publication ‘New developments in the analysis of catch time series as the basis for fish stock assessments: The CMSY++ method‘ may be of interest to young scientists.
Fishers in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. Reference image by Rasheedhrasheed, Wikimedia Commons.
A recent update introduced to the CMSY methodology used to assess the status of fish stocks has proven to more accurately predict the catch that a population can support than highly-valued data-intensive models.
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In over 30 years of continuous operation and development, FishBase has become one of the largest and most extensively accessed online public resources in the history of scientific research. A new study reveals it is also one of the most highly cited databases.
Africa Museum in Tervuren. Photo by Jean Housen, Wikimedia Commons.
The Sea Around Us partner, FishBase, is the largest global information system on fishes. It provides encyclopaedical information on all described fishes and includes many tools for scientists in a large array of ichthyological disciplines. With about 700,000 visits per month, it is the most successful database on any group of living organisms.
SeaLifeBase complements the success of FishBase and has become an important platform for information on non-fish marine organisms.