Data for: Coherent long-term body-size responses across all Northwest Atlantic herring populations to warming and environmental change despite contrasting harvest and ecological factors ...

• Main Author: Beaudry-Sylvestre, Manuelle
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2024
• Subjects: FOS Biological sciences; Thermal optimum; synchrony; size-at-age; Size-selective mortality; Density-dependence; life history theory; bottom-up effects; Comparative approach; Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c866t1gdx; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.c866t1gdx

Body size is a key component of individual fitness and an important factor in the structure and functioning of populations and ecosystems. Disentangling the effects of environmental change, harvest, and intra- and inter-specific trophic effects on body size remains challenging for populations in the wild. Herring in the Northwest Atlantic provide a strong basis for evaluating hypotheses related to these drivers given that they have experienced significant warming and harvest over the past century, while also having been exposed to a wide range of other selective constraints across their range. Using data on mean length-at-age 4 for the sixteen principal populations over a period of 53 cohorts (1962-2014), we fitted a series of empirical models for temporal and between-population variation in the response to changes in sea surface temperature. We find evidence for a unified cross-population response in the form of a parabolic function according to which populations in naturally warmer environments have ... : See Methods section in: Coherent long-term body-size responses across all Northwest Atlantic herring populations to warming and environmental change despite contrasting harvest and ecological factors. ...