Traditionally, marine fisheries management has relied heavily on single-species population models to guide the development of measures aimed at ensuring the sustainability of fisheries resources. These models typically focus on key population dynamics, including growth rate, recruitment, selectivity, biomass, natural mortality, and fishing mortality. The interplay of these factors determines the fluctuations in the population size of target species over time.
Beyond single-species population models, fisheries management increasingly employs more complex models, such as ecosystem models. These models aim to account for broader ecological processes, including biological interactions between species, which is a core aspect of multi-species models. An ecosystem model (EM) is a framework that incorporates ecosystem components (e.g., species or functional groups) and ecological processes (e.g., predation, perturbations, and dispersal), using data to make inferences about specific elements or the entire ecosystem. These models, often visualized as networks, help predict outcomes of complex ecological interactions and are widely used in marine and terrestrial management.
Multi-species models (MSMs) can model trophic interactions, competition, predation, and other ecological dynamics, and are primarily used for strategic advice in fisheries management, informing long-term decisions and bracketing a range of viable options. The use of MSMs has expanded to various other purposes; for example, in the US Atlantic and the Irish Sea, these models have been employed to adjust single-species management reference points, considering multispecies interactions and enhancing ecosystem understanding. Many studies have advanced our understanding of these tools, but a systematic assessment of how MSMs are related to the geographical areas in which they are applied remains lacking.
This article – summarized from the original publication (Couve, P. et al. 2024. Systematic Review of Multi-Species Models in Fisheries: Key Features and Current Trends. Fishes 2024, 9(10), 372) – reports on a comprehensive review of the application of multi-species models in fisheries research, highlighting their geographic and species-specific uses.
This study involved a literature review on multi-species models (MSMs) conducted using Elsevier’s Scopus database (www.scopus.com, accessed on 23 November 2022). The review methodology followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. PRISMA is a standardized framework that helps ensure clear and complete reporting of research methods and findings for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The PRISMA approach involves the use of a checklist and a flow diagram to promote transparent and comprehensive presentation of the research process and results.
The systematic review search formula yielded a total of 787 articles. From these, only 78 articles met the eligibility criteria described and were fully reviewed (Fig. 1). A total of 86 MSMs were identified across the 78 articles reviewed.
Managing mixed fisheries effectively remains a significant challenge. While the need for improved approaches is clear, most frequent applications of multispecies and ecosystem approaches have been observed in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly North America and western Europe.
These initiatives, driven by the goal of advancing towards the next generation of ecosystem-based fisheries management, have focused on culturally and commercially important fisheries, particularly those targeting small pelagic and demersal species. This geographic and species focus underscores the need to acknowledge the most significant predator-prey interactions, especially those involving small pelagic fish.
This work shows sustained development and application of MSMs incorporating predation dynamics for fishery management and research. Our results serve as a comprehensive guide for stakeholders, decision makers and scientists to review existing work related to multi-species models. It offers insights into their adoption in fisheries management and research, considering data availability and regional development.