US GLOBEC Newsletter 14: Cod & Climate Change

| Where Are We in the ICES / GLOBEC Cod and Climate Change (CCC) Programme ?? by Keith Brander
Also in This Issue .... LTOP in the NEP Zooplankton in OR Coastal Zone El Niño Affects Marine Nekton GLOBEC Studies in the CGOA GoMex Workshop - Summary Cod & Climate Change Program Notes From the Field .... Sea Scallop Fishery Closures
The first meeting of the ICES / International GLOBEC Working Group on Cod and Climate Change took place in 1993. Much of the plan produced then has been carried out, and has resulted in a number of reports (the more recent of which can be downloaded from the web site). The program also acted as a catalyst and focus for a great deal of related work by individuals and research teams. A new five-year plan was approved by ICES in September. Objectives of the CCC Five-year Plan: To incorporate environmental information in a quantitative manner into fisheries management strategies and planning To examine past events or periods as a means of better understanding the links between changes in the environment and fisheries To understand the relative importance of zooplankton in determining the variability in cod abundance and production To undertake comparative studies of life history strategies and interannual variability in growth, distribution, and abundance between cod stocks around the North Atlantic To understand and predict climate variability and its associated ecosystem response To ensure that environmental and fisheries data are easily and widely available To provide a synthesis of the research information obtained on cod stocks The word "environment" appears in three of the [above] seven objectives, and the preamble to the plan states that it " ... refers to the biological (e.g. plankton, food and predators), as well as the physical and chemical characteristics of the water." In fact, the environmental information for CCC also includes meteorological and ecosystem variability in addition to these proximate factors. The CCC program has already brought together much relevant information about the physical and biological environment of cod, but so far it has proved difficult to apply this information in a way which achieves the first objective. This is probably the major scientific and organizational challenge for the new plan. The same may be true for the U.S. GLOBEC program on Georges Bank, where a huge amount has been learned about the physics and the coupled population dynamics of many prey and predator species of cod and haddock, yet the way in which this knowledge will be applied to improve our assessment of the fisheries is not clear. Cod Growth Workshop One CCC activity in 2000 which will tackle the issue of how to apply information about the physical and biological environment is a workshop on the Dynamics of Cod Growth. The ICES / GLOBEC office has also been trying to design and implement web-based systems for collaborative science, and the cod growth workshop will use these for international exchange of ideas, information, and data / bibliographic references. New software and rapid communication open up many possibilities for collaborative scientific work between remote investigators, but putting these together in a form which people feel comfortable with still poses some challenges. Much of the preparation of data, graphs, and references for the growth workshop website was carried out by Dave O'Brien from the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory during a month he spent at the ICES / GLOBEC office in Copenhagen, funded by U.S. GLOBEC. Thanks Dave !! The U.S. GLOBEC community has always been closely involved with the CCC program, and has provided a great deal of much appreciated scientific, financial and organizational support for activities within ICES. Backward Facing Workshops Retrospective analysis is a very productive component of the CCC program and has resulted in some valuable new understanding of the causes of past events. At the first Backward Facing (BF) Workshop, information about biological events (the change in cod distribution off New England in the late 1870s, and the great tilefish kill in 1882) was used to identify a period with unusual ocean climate, and hence to develop a better understanding of ocean physics and the effects of the Labrador Current. The traffic of information is not always one way between physics and biology. The third BF workshop in May 1998 dealt with "Ocean Climate of the NW Atlantic during the 1960s and 70s, and Consequences for Gadoid Populations," and was described by Mike Fogarty in U.S. GLOBEC News 13. Since then a parallel workshop in March 1999 looked at Gadoid Stocks in the North Sea during the 1960s and 1970s, and we are still in the process of digesting the findings and comparing the two areas. A follow-up workshop is planned to continue with these comparisons. FIGURE 1. Cod and haddock recruitment (log scale) for the North Sea, Georges Bank and Browns Bank Although the term "gadoid outburst" has been used to describe the increase in recruitment (and catches, and spawning biomass) which took place in the North Sea during the 1960s, the phenomenon lasted for a much longer period. Both cod and haddock stocks show coherence in recruitment between Georges Bank and Browns Bank (Fig. 1), possibly reflecting common environmental forcing or drift of eggs and larvae between them. The spawning areas of cod in the North Sea are spread over 800 km, but are treated as one stock, whereas the spawning areas of cod on Georges and Browns Bank are less than 100 km apart, but are assessed separately. This probably tells us more about political reality than biological and/or physical reality, and one wonders how many cod stocks there would be in the North Sea if every country had its own fishing zone. Other National Programs It is not easy to identify all the GLOBEC-related research around the North Atlantic because the range of subject matter is so wide, and encompasses many activities which are relevant but are not in any formal sense part of GLOBEC. Apart from the U.S., only Canada has a funded GLOBEC science plan. Other countries have national programs, which are sometimes described as GLOBEC, or they are beginning to put such programs together. The EU has a GLOBEC Science Plan, but it does not have its own funding. Nevertheless, there are several mature and highly relevant research programs of which participants in U.S. GLOBEC should be aware, notably the French PNDR program (which started in 1992 and held its final symposium in 1998) and several past and ongoing international programs in the Baltic. Some information on other national GLOBEC activity is given in the fourth ICES / GLOBEC Newsletter. Last updated: 14 October, 1999 Please address any comments, suggestions or questions to: GLOBEC Webmaster