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Understanding the dynamics of complex food webs to inform fisheries sustainability
Mathematical Biology| Speaker: | Fernanda Valdovinos, Environmental Science & Policy, UC Davis |
| Related Webpage: | https://www.fsvaldovinos.com/ |
| Location: | Zoom |
| Start time: | Mon, Feb 1 2021, 2:10PM |
** This talk is cross-listed as a CAMPOS Research Colloquium **
We are facing a fisheries crisis worldwide, with fish stocks and marine ecosystems collapsing due to human overexploitation. Understanding the interconnectedness among species in harvested ecosystems and their dynamic responses to fishing is critical for informing managing practices to attain fisheries sustainability. Two of our recent publications evaluate such interconnectedness among several dozens of species in harvested ecosystems using network analysis, mathematical models and computational tools. First, we investigate the combined effects of artisanal fisheries and climate change on an intertidal food web of the Central Coast of Chile, showing that climate change more strongly affects the food web than artisanal fisheries. Second, we incorporate economic drivers of fishing effort into food web models, evaluating the dynamics of thousands of single-species fisheries across hundreds of simulated food webs under fixed-effort and open-access management strategies. Our work exemplifies the importance of studying the effects of fisheries on the entire food web, instead of only focusing on the target species, and of introducing humans as dynamic components into our food web models to answer questions of fisheries sustainability.
Contact Mariel Vazquez for any questions mrlvazquez@ucdavis.edu