Review of the ecosystem approach in Cumberland Sound, Nunavut, Canada

Abstract

Historically, fisheries have been monitored at the individual stock level, without consideration to connectivity to other species or activities in the ecosystem. The ecosystem approach requires that the stock and fishery be seen in the context of predators, competitors, prey, by-catch impacts, other fisheries and abiotic environmental variables so that management is holistic. In this review, we describe the components of the ecosystem approach applied in the scientific investigation of fisheries in Cumberland Sound, NU. Relative to other Canadian Arctic locales with commercial fisheries operations, the Cumberland Sound area has a greater biodiversity and abundance of fish and marine mammal species These components support active fisheries for Arctic Charr, Greenland Halibut, Beluga Whale as well as Ringed, Bearded and Harp Seal. The species and their fisheries are variable in character, their ecosystem effects and their response to the environment. We describe the species dynamics and their fisheries within an ecosystem context. We briefly note the challenges to developing an overarching model of the system such as the integration of the different life histories of the species, as well as the incorporation of future non-fisheries related disturbances.

Canada's forage fish: an important but poorly understood component of marine ecosystems

“…Environmental DNA (eDNA) may also be a cost-effective tool for collecting distribution data of forage fish when other survey methods are not available (reviewed in Wang et al 2021), or to groundtruth other survey methods, such as hydroacoustic surveys (e.g., Berger et al 2020) and bottom trawl surveys, which are known to under-sample forage fish species (Afzali et al 2021, Stoeckle et al 2021). An EAFM benefits from the inclusion of TEK or LEK; TEK can augment information on data-deficient stocks/populations, which includes many of Canada's forage fish (Tallman and Marcoux 2021). Furthermore, immediate ways to increase forage fish distribution data are to optimize data collections by adding complementary sampling to existing fisheries-independent surveys where forage fish may not be the focal species (Boldt et al 2019), and collating vessel spatial data from harvesters.…”

Use of satellite imagery to estimate distribution and abundance of Cumberland Sound beluga whales reveals frequent use of a glacial river estuary

“…Only one group and three lone whales were observed on September 7, 2021, in the farthest part of the fiord, near but not in the small estuary (Supplementary Figure 7). This estuary has narrow access with slight rapids, which may contribute to its lack of use by the whales, and the water input is from Kipisa Lake (Tallman and Marcoux, 2021), which also does not have direct glacial water input. Whales were observed in this area during the 2014 and 2017 aerial surveys in groups under 10 individuals (Watt et al, 2021a).…”