From Ions to Ecosystems: A Novel Framework for the Biomonitoring and Management of Vulnerable and Commercial Fishes

水生生态系统提供各种关键商品和服务，包括渔业、能源和海岸保护。然而，这些脆弱的生态系统正日益受到气候变化、污染物和过度捕捞等相互作用的压力因素的威胁。为了在日益不可预测的气候中保护关键的生态系统服务并确保粮食安全，迫切需要提高我们对鱼类栖息地需求及其对不同压力源的脆弱性的理解。在这个项目中，我们采用综合系统方法来解决这些知识差距，为21世纪水生生态系统的可持续管理提供新的解决方案。为了实现可持续的渔业管理，我们需要了解鱼类在不同物种和生命阶段的连通性模式。电子档案标签的出现大大提高了我们对鱼类运动和栖息地利用的了解，但样本大小可能受到高昂成本的限制，而且标签通常仅限于体型较大的物种和生命阶段。因此，我们通常对幼鱼的生命阶段和支持我们商业渔业的苗圃栖息地知之甚少。幸运的是，所有的动物都有自己内在的“传感器”，在它们成长的过程中，它们会记录下大量关于内部和外部环境的信息。通过询问逐渐生长的组织（如鱼耳石和眼睛镜片）中的生物地球化学示踪剂，我们将阅读它们的“生活故事”，并获得对它们过去健康状况和栖息地使用的独特见解。这些组织通常表现出生长带（“生物年代学”），类似于树木的年轮，这使我们能够回顾过去，重建鱼的年龄、生长和运动时间，为探索压力源对其生理和健康的潜在和累积影响提供了令人兴奋的机会。尽管档案标签、化学示踪剂和生物年代学有明显的机会相互交叉验证和增强，但它们很少结合使用。该项目旨在展示如何整合和扩展这些工具，以支持有效的生态系统管理。这一全球计划涉及一系列案例研究，整合了新兴技术（如电子档案标签和机器学习）、新型化学示踪剂和建模，以量化和预测关键鱼类物种在广泛的全球变化情景下的运动和适应性。我们正在以北海为模型系统，探索综合鱼类健康和连通性监测如何加强海洋空间规划。通过配对来自同一条鱼的耳石化学和档案标签数据，我们将确定使用耳石示踪剂重建个体运动模式的最佳方法。为了阐明驱动渔业绩效年际变化的机制，我们将开发和验证用于重建鱼类健康和污染物暴露历史的新工具。为了揭示脆弱鲑鱼的关键栖息地、饮食来源和精细运动模式，我们将使用同位素图（“等温线”）和示踪剂，并结合新的机器学习方法。为了量化缺氧对鱼类大小和健康的潜在和累积影响，我们将结合档案标签记录和化学示踪剂，然后预测这一日益严重的环境问题对渔业生产力和稳定性的影响。这些案例研究的综合将为鱼类栖息地需求及其对相互作用的压力源的脆弱性提供新的见解，提高我们预测渔业对不同全球变化和管理情景的反应的能力。最后，为了促进多学科创新并将这些新兴工具整合到主流资源管理中，我们将建立一个致力于鱼组织化学记录的探索、翻译和应用的国际联盟（EXTRACT）。

Aquatic ecosystems provide a variety of critical goods and services, including fisheries, energy and coastal protection. However, these fragile ecosystems are increasingly threatened by interacting stressors such as climate change, pollutants and overfishing. To protect key ecosystem services and ensure food security in an increasingly unpredictable climate, there is a pressing need to improve our understanding of fish habitat requirements and their vulnerability to different stressors. In this programme, we are using an integrated systems approach to address these knowledge gaps, providing novel solutions for the sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems in the 21st Century.To deliver sustainable fisheries management we need to understand fish connectivity patterns across species and life stages. Our knowledge of fish movements and habitat use has been significantly enhanced by the advent of electronic archival tags, but sample sizes can be limited by high costs, and the tags are typically restricted to larger-bodied species and life stages. Accordingly, we often know very little about juvenile life stages and the nursery habitats supporting our commercial fisheries. Luckily, all animals are equipped with their own intrinsic 'sensors' that record a wealth of information about the internal and external environment as they grow. By interrogating biogeochemical tracers in incrementally-grown tissues such as fish ear stones and eye lenses, we will read their 'life stories' and gain unique insights into their past health and habitat use. These tissues often exhibit growth bands ('biochronologies'), analogous to tree rings, which allow us to look back in time to reconstruct the fish's age, growth and movement timings, providing exciting opportunities to explore latent and cumulative effects of stressors on their physiology and health. Despite clear opportunities for archival tags, chemical tracers and biochronologies to cross-validate and augment each other, they are rarely used in combination. This programme aims to demonstrate how to integrate and scale these tools to support effective ecosystem management.This global programme involves a series of case studies that integrate emerging technologies (e.g. electronic archival tags and machine learning), novel chemical tracers and modelling to quantify and predict the movements and fitness of key fish species over a broad range of global change scenarios. We are using the North Sea as a model system to explore how integrated fish health and connectivity monitoring could enhance marine spatial planning. By pairing otolith chemistry and archival tag data from the same fish, we will determine optimal methods for reconstructing individual movement patterns using otolith tracers. To shed light on the mechanisms driving interannual variability in fisheries performance, we will develop and validate new tools for reconstructing fish health and contaminant exposure history. To reveal the critical habitats, dietary sources and fine-scale movement patterns of vulnerable salmonids we will use isotopic maps ('isoscapes') and tracers combined with novel machine learning methods. To quantify the latent and cumulative effects of hypoxia on fish size and fitness we will combine archival tag records and chemical tracers, then predict the impact of this growing environmental issue on fisheries productivity and stability. The overall synthesis of these case studies will provide new insights into fish habitat needs and their vulnerabilities to interacting stressors, improving our ability to predict fishery responses to differing global change and management scenarios. Finally, to promote multidisciplinary innovation and the integration of these emerging tools into mainstream resource management, we will establish an International Consortium dedicated to the EXploration, TRanslation and Application of Chemical records in fish Tissues (EXTRACT).