Standard Presentation Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting 2023

Historical larval hotspots of pelagic fish in the Indian and Pacific Oceans (#145)

Kristine Camille V Buenafe 1 2 , Sandra Neubert 2 3 , Jason D Everett 2 4 5 , Daniel C Dunn 1 6 , Pablo Granados-Dieseldorff 7 , Jason Flower 8 9 , Kylie Scales 10 , Alvise Dabalà 1 2 11 12 , James Mercer 5 , Iain M Suthers 5 13 , Anthony J Richardson 2 4
  1. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia
  2. School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia
  3. Institute of Computer Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
  4. Queensland Biosciences Precinct, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Environment, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia
  5. Centre for Marine Science and Innovation, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  6. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia
  7. Waitt Institute, La Jolla, California, USA
  8. Environmental Markets Lab, University of California, Sandra Barbara, California, USA
  9. Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA
  10. Ocean Futures Research Cluster, School of Science, Technology & Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast,, Queensland, Australia
  11. Systems Ecology and Resource Management, Department of Organism Biology, Faculté des Sciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles - ULB, Brussels, Belgium
  12. Ecology and Biodiversity, Laboratory of Plant Biology and Nature Management, Biology Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel - VUB, Brussels, Belgium
  13. Sydney Institute of Marine Science, Mosman, New South Wales, Australia

Ecosystem-based fisheries management approaches aim to—informed by the affected ecosystem—holistically manage existing fish stocks. Such approaches, particularly establishing conservation-sensitive fisheries closures, afford fisheries contributions towards international conservation targets (e.g., global initiative to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030). Designs of fisheries closures should include important areas to fisheries, such as potential spawning grounds. Larval fish data are often only available locally and only for economically important species (e.g., bluefin tunas). Because of this, broad-scale information on potential fish spawning grounds are scarce. Nishikawa et al. (1985) represents the only known repository for near-global (50°N-50°S) historical larval distribution data on multiple pelagic species. We use this digitized data together with environmental data from Earth System Models to build larval habitat suitability models using Boosted Regression Trees for 17 pelagic fish taxa. We provide information on hemispheric seasonality and potential drivers of larval distribution for all taxa considered. Using Principal Component Analysis, we identify seasonal larval hotspots common to multiple species in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The cross-taxa nature of the identified larval hotspots could imply conservation benefits beyond fisheries.