| Summary: | Marine exploited populations exhibit various degrees of discreteness, ranging from historical evolutionary to contemporary ecological levels of differentiation. An integrated approach combining complementary population discrimination tools such as otolith microchemistry and genetics may capitalize on these different time scales to improve the discrimination and traceability power in management applications. Additionally, novel statistical and technological improvements have enabled the joint extraction of demographic, life-history and genetic information from archived otolith collections, to unveil the evolutionary consequences of anthropogenic pressure in wild fish populations. Here, I overview the most recent integrated results obtained from genetic markers (microsatellites and SNPs) and otoliths (growth-maturity, microchemistry and shape data) on adult sole (Solea solea) populations in the North-East Atlantic Ocean. While genetic markers provide a clear regional differentiation and local adaptation pattern, otoliths data often provide an improved small scale geographical resolution. At the temporal scale, combining molecular and otolith back-calculation data enables a powerfull assessment of changes in population size/demography, while tracing back the genetic basis of life-history trait evolution under heavy anthropogenic pressure. Our results highlight the power of a multi-marker approach depending on the required spatial resolution scale and emphasize the relevance of integrated phenotypic-genetic temporal analyses to unveil human induced selection factors in future management scenarios. Monitoring efficiently the resilience of marine harvested populations hence requires interdisciplinarity in research priorities, covering both the evolutionary and ecological components of population connectivity and demography.
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