A new study coordinated by the ICM and the IEO reveals the areas of the Spanish and French coast where there is a greater overlap of the different pressures.

Sardines (Sardina pilchardus) and anchovies (Engraulis encrasicolus) are the most traded and consumed fish in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, representing almost 40% of the region’s catches. In recent decades, the combined impact of fishing and rising water temperatures, which has been particularly high in this Mediterranean region, has led to the decline of sardine and anchovy populations, compromising the sustainability of the stocks.

This is the main conclusion of a study by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM), the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) and Ecopath International Initiative (EII) published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. According to the study, the area of ​​the Spanish and French coast where the anchovy, and especially the sardine, are suffering the most is the northern Catalan coast and the Gulf of Lion, where there is a strong overlap of environmental and fishing pressure on these small pelagic species.

Cumulative climate effect on sardine. Source: Ramirez et al. 2020.

You can also read about this study at ICM-CSIC

Our colleague Berta Sala Solà from the IDAEA-CSIC presented important results from our PELCAT project regarding “Organophosphate esters in edible fish from the Mediterranean Sea” in PLASTIC’ 2020 symposium.

The presentation was featured in the media.

Our new paper regarding global marine ecosystem modelling is out in Frontiers in Marine Science

Check it out here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.567877/abstract

In this study, we present a global ecosystem modelling complex, EcoOcean v2, and use it to simulate past and future scenarios of marine ecosystem change, where we quantify the impacts of alternative configurations of the ecological model, responses to alternative climate-change scenarios, and the additional impacts of fishing. Our results show how future ecological trajectories are sensitive to alternative configurations of EcoOcean, highlighting the importance of model structural uncertainty in marine ecosystem models. Our results also show important changes in marine organism biomass distributions and in ecosystem structure under various scenarios of climate change. Ecological trajectories are sensitive to environmental drivers from alternative ESM outputs and RCPs, they show spatial variability and more severe changes when IPSL model and RCP 8.5 scenario are used. Under a non-fishing configuration, larger organisms show decreasing trends, while smaller organisms show mixed or increasing results. Fishing intensifies the negative effects predicted by climate change, which results in stronger biomass declines for species already losing under climate change, or dampened positive impacts for those increasing. Several species groups that win under climate change become losers under combined impacts, while only a few (small benthopelagic fish and cephalopods) species are projected to show positive biomass changes under cumulative impacts.