Potential impacts of the restoration of coastal and estuarine nurseries on the stock dynamics of fisheries species

The response of marine fish population productivity to juvenile habitat modifications depends upon life histories

“…meta-analyses such as Le Pape and Bonhommeau (2015) or the FishLife package; see Thorson, 2020); and from analytical stock assessment models. Hence, given that analytical stock assessment models exist for more than a thousand stocks worldwide (1359 assessed stocks in the RAM database (Myers et al, 1995) in February 2023) and for 43% of the 256 evaluated stocks in the Northeast Atlantic (Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF), 2022), our method has considerable potential for application, notably for stock-specific case studies with existing quantification of juvenile habitat degradation (Gernez et al, 2023).…”

“…In addition, the processes modified by each multiplier (mortality rates and surface area) are at completely different scales; thus, a change of +/−25% had dramatically different impacts in terms of the value range. This scale issue must be considered thoroughly before adapting the model to realistic scenarios (Gernez et al, 2023). Both these scenario hypotheses and contrasts in scales prevented us from analyzing cumulative responses because of the greater weight of quality in the response.…”

“…Finally, if our framework provides insights to theoretically analyze the effects of habitat degradation/restoration on population productivity, we recognize the lack of empirical evidence of its predictive accuracy. Even if few examples allow quantification of the loss of habitat surface or quality to provide sensible values of habitat multipliers (e.g., Champagnat et al, 2021;Gernez et al, 2023), data on their influence on population productivity are critically lacking in the literature (Brown et al, 2018).…”

“…Several simulation studies have focused on the impacts of local restoration scenarios on populations (Camp et al, 2020;Ono et al, 2019;Ruiz et al, 2009), and some have shown that restoring coastal nurseries may be even more beneficial than regulating fishing pressure (Levin & Stunz, 2005;van de Wolfshaar et al, 2015). The present study offers a framework to study the long-term consequences of both surface area loss and quality degradation of coastal habitats for population dynamics, which can be applied to multiple case studies (Gernez et al, 2023). However, the direct and short-term application of our framework to enhance stock assessment models is limited.…”