Applying the metabolic theory of ecology to estimate the productivity of inland fish communities

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Since 1868 the federal government of Canada has upheld environmental legislation to protect fish and their habitats. In 2012, revised wording of the Fisheries Act shifted legislation from the protection of fish habitat to the protection of fisheries productivity. The Act now requires that proposed development projects quantify and offset potential impacts on productivity. Quantifying the impacts of development remains a challenge and presents an opportunity for industry, government, and academia to develop tools that explicitly link productivity to habitat and offsetting practices. Concurrently, there is a need to account for the mounting impacts of climate change on fisheries resources. The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE), proposed in the early 2000s, is a promising framework to address these needs. Its equations can estimate ecologically important parameters such as population growth rates and interspecific interactions using mainly the body sizes of members of a community and temperature. While the framework was intended to be used purely for basic science, over the last decade it has been increasingly incorporated in applied management of natural resources, especially in the context of monitoring ocean fisheries. However, it has not been applied as readily across landscapes (e.g. management of a group of inland lakes) or as a predictive tool to estimate the fish productivity of aquatic habitats. This proposal addresses this challenge and uses MTE as a framework to address some fundamental ecological questions on how human activities, climate change, habitat quality, and community composition influence body size, population growth rates, and overall fish productivity in Canada's lakes and rivers. This proposal gathers scientific and management expertise from across academia, industry and government to ensure that the models developed have both applied relevance to Canada's regulatory landscape, as well as contribute to important questions within the fields of the Fisheries, Aquatic Sciences, the Metabolic Theory of Ecology and Spatial Ecology.