Restoration of marine ecosystems under the impacts of fisheries and climate

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My research aims to assess and mitigate the impacts of fisheries on aquatic ecosystems; exploitation in aquatic food webs shifts the balance between schooling pelagic fishes and demersal fish, and hence affects the long-term sustainability of human fisheries. New approaches, methodologies and tools are employed as hypothesis testing engines. In particular my research focusses on how historical reconstruction of past ecosystem states provides quantitative long-term management goals and a template against which management options can be evaluated.  The work employs several types of dynamic numerical ecosystem modelling, including spatial models, that allows tests of hypotheses about how fisheries alter the trophic structure, habitat, species diversity, keystone species and life history characteristics of organisms in aquatic ecosystems. This methodology makes it possible to carry out thought-experiments, since real ones are both impractical and unethical. Historical case studies use spatial simulation techniques, including the recovery of fish and fisheries in depleted, overfished and polluted systems, the effects of no-take marine reserves, sectoral closures and human-made reefs. The work attempts to emulate important ecological processes in plankton dynamics, trophodynamics, habitat structure and life history parameters. Models are improved by challenging them with considerable amounts of data from surveys and experimental analyses. Parameter uncertainty is accounted by for Monte Carlo techniques while climate fluctuations are simulated using a range of environmental forcing functions at selected nodes in the ecosystem models; risks are evaluated using semi-Bayesian Monte Carlo techniques. I am also further developing a multi-disciplinary rapid evaluation technique, termed "Rapfish", that uses non-parametric ordination and fuzzy logic to provide numerical scores, with confidence limits, that express compliance with stated management goals, such as sustainability, or compliance with international codes of conduct. Case studies come from a wide range of temperate, tropical and polar ecosystems.