Ocean Environment and Fisheries

Arthur Miller

Ocean Environment and Fisheries

Arthur Miller

2008, Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union

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Eos, Vol. 89, No. 25, 17 June 2008 information about seasonality, peak flow timing, and extremes. Managers further discussed needs for enhanced decision support, including tools that allow users to test and visualize how changes to the water cycle and climate will affect existing policies and vice versa, along with more extensive explanatory information to accompany climate projections and scenarios. Managers bemoaned black-box models and recommended validation by independent auditors. They mentioned that collaborative learning with peer stakeholders and researchers results in greater acceptance of uncertainties in observations and projections, and improves understanding of connections between models, observations, and system sensitivities. To streamline decision support, they indicated a preference for face-to-face meetings, away from their offices, that allow participants to explore the ramifications of management decisions in light of hydroclimatic projections. Engineering discussions highlighted needs to evaluate and redesign water, wastewater, and flood control systems to ensure robust operations in anticipation of greater climate extremes. Participants noted a need for multidisciplinary approaches to improve understanding of the magnitude of energy required for water distribution and treatment, and requested integrated evaluations BOOK REVIEW Ocean Environment and Fisheries M. P. M. Reddy Science Publishers; 2007; 548 pp.; ISBN 978-1-57808-519-4; $115. PAGE 228 Very few marine fisheries assessments use oceanic environmental information when estimating stocks for management purposes, exceptions being assessments of California sardines and northern Australian prawns, which use sea surface temperature. Instead, assessments are based on trends and indices of abundance, biomass, age composition, size at age, maturity, and so forth, as indicators of the health and trajectory of fish stocks. Recently, there have been many attempts to better understand the impact of the spatial and temporal variations of the physical ocean state on fish populations and to consequently enhance the efficacy of these stock assessments. It is in this atmosphere that this book arrives with high expectations. A volume that could synthesize our current understanding of how environmental factors, such as ocean temperature, thermocline distribution, mixed-layer depth, mesoscale frontal statistics, and so forth, influence the health and stability of fish populations and the ecosystems where they abide would be welcome indeed. The book, instead, is generally organized in an encyclopedic fashion, with only a short and very general introductory exposition attempting to link specific responses in marine ecosystems and fish populations to environmental forcing. The penultimate chapter, which catalogs by region some recent results by various investigators, is presented more like a listing of abstracts of the articles than like an integrated explanation of causes and effects. The final chapter, on fisheries forecasts, provides only a brief overview of some of the physical fields, such as ocean temperature or sea surface temperature fronts, included in weekly or seasonal forecasts of fisheries in Japan, the United States, China, and India. As a bound atlas of information, however, the book is sound. It includes a compendium of the most important commercial marine fishes, from sardine to salmon, and from haddock to halibut. It would have seasoned the presentation to include sketches or colorful photos of these fishes. Instead, the discussions of the various fishes are simply cut and dried. The book goes on to present statistics of fish catches from 1950 to 1994, organized by oceanic regions delimited by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Although the dry text associated with this accounting essentially amounts to reading numbers off of charts and tables, these charts and tables will provide a useful resource for researchers requiring a quick look at how various groups of fish populations have changed over the decades of the 1950s through the 1980s, or from 1988 to 1994. A more updated account of fish catches through the early 2000s would have been more opportune for linking the variations to the pronounced global warming signals observed over the most recent decades. of water supply decisions, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental impacts, and economic trade-offs in balancing these factors. Organizers plan continued engagements to foster connections between scientists and practitioners. Workshop recommendations will be presented to Arizona’s climate adaptation initiative, and science priorities have been presented at a National Academy of Sciences colloquium. For an executive summary, see http://azwaterinstitute.org/ workshops.html. —GREGG GARFIN, University of Arizona, Tucson; E-mail: [email protected]; KATHARINE JACOBS, Arizona Water Institute, Tucson; and JAMES BUIZER, Arizona State University, Tempe As it is, the most recent data presented are 14 years old. The remaining chapters of the book contain extensive descriptions of the basic physical oceanography, the typical nutrient distributions, and the general patterns of the low-trophic-level ecosystem (phytoplankton, zooplankton, and benthos) for each of the major oceanic regions. While the information will be handy for those seeking some of the references for understanding the factors that lead to these distributions, the regional approach has already been exceptionally well covered in Ecological Geography of the Sea by Alan Longhurst. And, unfortunately, the figures that were included in these chapters are disappointingly primitive, with hand-drawn arrows schematically indicating major ocean currents and hand-drawn hatching indicating the approximate distributions of phytoplankton and zooplankton. In this computer-driven age of sophisticated graphics tools and high-resolution satellite products, it is hard to imagine a book being published with figures of ocean regions bounded by hand-drawn continental outlines. But although this book is loaded with such figures, they do manage to get the message across to the reader in a quaint way, akin to a colleague sketching ideas on a chalkboard during a private discussion. The volume contains more than a few typographical errors, and the author oddly refers to ocean gyres as “circles.” Students and scientists may find this treatise useful as a desktop reference and a convenient starting point for more in-depth accounts of environmental influences on fish populations. But not many will find this book to be an illuminating and lively account of just how fascinating and dynamic this cross-disciplinary topic really can be. —ARTHUR J. MILLER, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla; E-mail: [email protected]

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