Applied Fisheries Ecology

• Describe and compare the key principles and practical implications of the single-stock and ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management.
• Identify and explain current and anticipated challenges at the interface of fisheries and biodiversity conservation.
• Select and justify appropriate management measures to support sustainable exploitation of fish stocks.
• Interpret and summarize the main content of a typical ICES advice sheet.
• Review, present, and discuss scientific literature relevant to fisheries management, highlighting key results and their implications.
• Reflect critically on what “sustainability” means in the context of fisheries.
• Adapt and implement R scripts to estimate stock size, calculate biological reference points, and simulate short-term catch scenarios.
• Develop a basic fisheries management recommendation that combines the use of a simple single-species stock assessment with an evaluation of the broader ecosystem impacts of the fishing activity.

Fisheries support many millions of livelihoods, provide food security, and contribute to national economies as well as coastal societies, but fisheries can also impact ecosystems negatively. For instance, fishing activities may disrupt food webs, damage the sea floor, or be responsible for the unintended captures of threatened marine animals. During the past decades, an important effort has been made to develop the science and fisheries policies. In this course, we will study how fisheries scientists assess the size of fish stocks to produce stock-by-stock catch advice and how ecosystem considerations currently are moving up on the fisheries management agenda. We will look at concrete examples of fisheries management measures, including catch limits and area closures. The lectures will have a global perspective but will focus more closely on the North-East Atlantic and EU waters. The R programming language, being one of the most often used in ecology and fisheries science, will be used for the analytical parts of the course. The course program consists of (1) four modules covering the global perspective on fisheries, stock-by-stock assessments, and the ICES advice system, (2) four modules with analytical exercises in R, (3) four modules on the ecosystem approach to fisheries management, including a short legislative background and the tools available to managers to ensure fisheries sustainability and biodiversity conservation, and (4) a report assignment with a predefined problem that needs a solution. To reflect the newest pioneering research and trends, different researchers from DTU Aqua will be giving lectures and we will be discussing recently published scientific literature.

• 6 – 20 (Wed 13-17)

25318/25345, These are recommendations and not requirements

Lectures, individual and group assignments (problem solving and analytical exercises in R), and home assignments (e.g. read scientific articles and produce one report on a pre-defined topic/problem).

This course provides students with competences relevant to UN SDGs, particularly #12 (Responsible consumption and production), #13 (Climate action) and #14 (Life below water)

Is offered with Remote Classroom in Lyngby https:/​/​www.aqua.dtu.dk/​english/​education/​courses/​remote-classroom