Impact of climate change on inland fishes life cycle
Answers
To anticipate the response of fish populations to climate change, we developed a framework that integrates requirements in all life stages to assess impacts across the entire life cycle. The framework was applied on plaice (Pleuronectes platessa) and Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) in the North Sea, Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in the Norwegian/Barents Seas and European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) in the Bay of Biscay.habitats required by each life stage, habitat availability, and connectivity between habitats.these could be altered by climate change
• Inland fisheries are found on every continent apart from Antarctica and provide important contributions to global food demands. • Most food producing inland fisheries are found in developing countries and are largely located in the tropics. Some of the poorest, most food insecure countries in the world are disproportionately dependent upon inland fisheries for nutritional and food security.
• Worldwide, freshwater ecosystems that support the majority of inland fisheries are subject to a variety of anthropogenic pressures reflecting global change including over-extraction of water, over-exploitation of fish, introduction of non-native species, pollution, habitat degradation (including fragmentation) and increases in human populations. The impacts of climate change will interact with many of these factors.
• Climate change will lead to changes in freshwater habitats and the fish assemblages that they support: only a few of these effects are expected to be beneficial to inland fisheries especially those based on native fish populations.
• Freshwater ecosystems have relatively low buffering capacity and are therefore relatively sensitive to climate-related shocks and variability. There is a wide range of physiological and ecological impacts on both fish and the freshwater ecosystems supporting inland fisheries related to water temperature, water availability and flow, and other ecological perturbations.
• Given the scale of direct and indirect impacts of global change, the adaptive capacity of all temperate, tropical and subarctic freshwater ecosystems and existing inland fisheries is relatively low.
• Direct (and indirect) climate change impacts may see considerable shifts in species compositions, but overall productivity might be sustained because of the high diversity and resilience typically shown by tropical systems and many invasive fish species