Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/L008718/1
Multispecies models in fisheries
Training Grant Award
- Lead Supervisor:
- Professor NVC Polunin, Newcastle University, Sch of Natural & Environmental Sciences
- Grant held at:
- Newcastle University, Sch of Natural & Environmental Sciences
- Science Area:
- Marine
- Overall Classification:
- Marine
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Pollution and Waste
- Science Topics:
- None
- Abstract:
- Food webs define what eats what in ecosystems, and food webs have been widely used to predict how matter is transferred between organisms in the natural environment and how these organisms interact with each other. Fishery sustainability has traditionally relied on mathematical models of how single populations function yet these populations interact (e.g. feed on, otherwise interfere with each other through for example competition), often with major implications for sustainability and putting fisheries management into its complex ecosystem context. Multispecies community and food web models (mathematical models of how species interact in nature) can help us assess fishing impacts on marine community structure, including effects of removing species targeted by fishing and those arising through relationships between predators and their prey. These models are influenced by the prey sizes and species favoured by predators, and also by the ability to shift between alternative environments. For example, predators feeding across both benthic (seabed) and pelagic (water column) food webs may be more resilient to perturbations such as climate change and fishery exploitation as a result of this so-called benthic pelagic coupling. Carbon, nitrogen and other elements have unstable isotopes (e.g. for carbon, 14C) and also stable isotopes (12C, 13C) which behave differently from each other in the environment. Carbon stable isotopes help to indicate the source of carbon in a species diet because they change rather little in relative abundance on consumption, while those of nitrogen change more, and are a good indicator of trophic position, how high in the food web a predator is. Stable isotope show that body size is a very important determinant of what eats what in the North Sea food web. But to date there is very little test of whether this size-based structuring might apply to other areas such as the Celtic Sea. Based on a long-standing and fruitful collaboration between Newcastle University and Cefas, the student will work with stable isotope data and learn a range of modelling methods to ascertain a number of things including the extent to which this coupling between pelagic and benthic environments is influenced by environmental factors (e.g. temperature, depth), and whether and if so how knowledge of feeding relationships between predators and prey is improved when the assumptions inherent in the stable isotope approach are varied. The student will then use community and food web models to predict whether changes in the coupling lead to systemic changes in community structure and how it responds to fishery exploitation in different marine environments. The student will: deepen their experience of data gathering through involvement in vessel surveys, sample gathering and preparation, and stable isotope analyses; derive new data and combine these with existing data; identify North and Celtic Seas food webs which have strong pelagic and benthic associations, with 15-20 species apiece and sufficient stable isotope and diet data; prepare the data for analysis; explore effects of varying assumptions about how stable isotopes in the diet are affected by consumption by a predator (particularly changes in relative abundances of the isotopes between diet and consumer) to better describe and evaluate benthic pelagic coupling in each food web; explore and ascertain effects of various combinations of ecological features (e.g. abundance in size class, growth rate) on how benthic pelagic coupling varies in relation to body size; improve the model by applying different predation rates compare its performance with other multispecies models by analysing differences between model output predictions in predicted community size structure; and, by adding size-based fishing mortality, generate a model that predicts fishing effects and comparing its results with historical fishery data.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/L008718/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- DTG - directed
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Industrial CASE
This training grant award has a total value of £83,515
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Total - Fees | Total - RTSG | Total - Student Stipend |
|---|---|---|
| £16,226 | £11,000 | £56,292 |
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