Modelling the likely impacts of climate-driven changes in cod-capelin overlap in the Barents Sea

• Published in: ICES Journal of Marine Science
• Main Authors: Howell, Daniel, Filin, Anatoly A.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2014
• Subjects: Articles; Barents Sea; Howell; polar cod
• Online Access: http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/71/1/72; https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fst172

<qd> Howell, D., and Filin, A. A. Modelling the likely impacts of climate-driven changes in cod-capelin overlap in the Barents Sea. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 71: . </qd>Recent observations have indicated that the cod distribution within the Barents Sea is expanding towards the northeast. The area into which the cod are expanding has historically been an area with large stocks of polar cod and capelin. It can be expected that the continued expansion of cod into this region would lead to greater availability of these forage fish for cod predation and have a direct impact on the forage fish stock. The distributional shift may also reduce the level of cod cannibalism. Such changes have implications for the management of both cod and capelin fisheries. In this paper, we use two different models (Gadget and STOCOBAR) to examine the effects of the changing overlap on cod and capelin. The results from the two models are compared to reduce uncertainty due to model formulation and exploit the different strengths of the two approaches. Although there are many uncertainties around the ongoing changes, the results indicate that the increased spatial overlap could contribute to modest rises by up to 20% in the average cod stock biomass, but with an increase in the impact of cannibalism, and hence an increased variability in the cod stock size.