Marine reserves can buffer mismatches caused by climate change and fishing

Background/Question/Methods

One of the most daunting challenges to fisheries management is how to account for climate change.  Climate change is causing shifts in the seasonal timing of climatic events, commonly leading to temporal trophic mismatches such as discrepancies between larval release timing and productive spring upwelling in temperate marine systems.  Here we incorporate temporal environmental variation and change in a dynamic, spatially-implicit, age-structured model with density dependence, representing both climatic and maternal influences on mismatch-dependent larval survival.

Results/Conclusions

In an application to gopher rockfish (Sebastes carnatus) we demonstrate that the probability of persistence and fishery yield increases with a slight delay in spring transition timing (causing a temporal mismatch between S. carnatus larvae and their prey) but decreases with a greater delay or any advancement.  Inclusion of maternal-age-dependent larval release timing generally decreases total yield and the fishing mortality the population can withstand and still persist (F_persist) under a changing climate.  Compared to conventional fisheries management, no-take reserves generally decreased total yield and increased F_persist, as expected but actually increased yields in some cases when spring transition was greatly altered.