“…The characterization of environmental conditions and the response of fish populations to the change of these conditions can be approached using various methodologies and modelling techniques (qualitative, quantitative, discrete or continuous, physical, statistical, etc.) through which it is possible to establish and simulate statistical functional relationships between different variables (Silliman, 1967;King and Paulik, 1967;Paulik, 1969;Francis, 1974;Fonteneau, 1975;Takeuchi and Taneishi, 1976;Tillman and Stadelman, 1976;Hammond and Lackey, 1976;Sissenwine, 1977;Grant et al, 1981;Crutchfield, 1986;Hilborn and Walters, 1987;Kleiber and Baker, 1987;Castro and Erzini, 1988;Erzini, 1990;Erzini and Castro, 1998;Christensen and Pauly, 1992;Walters et al, 1997Walters et al, , 2000Moeseneder et al, 2015;Schiavina et al, 2015;Begley, 2005;Erzini et al, 2006;Taylor et al, 2007). This allows the comparison of the responses of the system analysed under different environmental conditions or management scenarios (Sterman et al, 2012).…”