The status of marine fish stocks needs to be assessed to ensure fishing practices that exploit the stocks at sustainable levels. This assessment is based on multiple data types that include catch data, monitoring of fishery landings, biological observers and research trawl surveys which provide critical fishery-independent information. Traditional methods to assess the state of fish stocks through scientific surveys have experienced a very slow progress and present recognized shortcomings. These include a high economic cost coupled with complex logistics, very sparse data in space and time as a direct consequence and a long-time required to treat and analyse the collected data. These limitations result in a i) frequent mismatch between the biological data, the corresponding management unit/s and the true biological population, and ii) a lack of accuracy in estimating fish abundance and other key parameters for population management. All of this severely impacts resource sustainability and hinders socio-economic and biodiversity goals.
Scientific studies on genomic-based approaches to marine fish stocks have been growing in recent years and could start providing useful inputs to improve cost-efficiency of marine fisheries research surveys, as well as increase promptness and accuracy of fish stocks assessments. High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) genomic techniques offer a series of advantages to marine monitoring and assessment programs with respect to the traditional methods that are worth to explore.
In this research topic we aim to evaluate the suitability of HTS techniques to estimate essential parameters for fisheries stock assessments. These include absolute abundance, biomass, age and sex, and other relevant parameters for fisheries assessments and management, namely stock boundaries and connectivity, and fine-scale population structure, among many others.
The status of marine fish stocks needs to be assessed to ensure fishing practices that exploit the stocks at sustainable levels. This assessment is based on multiple data types that include catch data, monitoring of fishery landings, biological observers and research trawl surveys which provide critical fishery-independent information. Traditional methods to assess the state of fish stocks through scientific surveys have experienced a very slow progress and present recognized shortcomings. These include a high economic cost coupled with complex logistics, very sparse data in space and time as a direct consequence and a long-time required to treat and analyse the collected data. These limitations result in a i) frequent mismatch between the biological data, the corresponding management unit/s and the true biological population, and ii) a lack of accuracy in estimating fish abundance and other key parameters for population management. All of this severely impacts resource sustainability and hinders socio-economic and biodiversity goals.
Scientific studies on genomic-based approaches to marine fish stocks have been growing in recent years and could start providing useful inputs to improve cost-efficiency of marine fisheries research surveys, as well as increase promptness and accuracy of fish stocks assessments. High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) genomic techniques offer a series of advantages to marine monitoring and assessment programs with respect to the traditional methods that are worth to explore.
In this research topic we aim to evaluate the suitability of HTS techniques to estimate essential parameters for fisheries stock assessments. These include absolute abundance, biomass, age and sex, and other relevant parameters for fisheries assessments and management, namely stock boundaries and connectivity, and fine-scale population structure, among many others.
