Opposing trends in survival and recruitment slow the recovery of a historically overexploited fishery

• Main Authors: Phillips, Joseph S., Gubergsson, Guni, Ives, Anthony R
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of Toronto 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic charr; Iceland; Salvelinus alpinus
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/111123; http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjfas-2021-0161

Quantifying temporal variation in demographic rates is a central goal of population ecology. In this study, we analyzed a multidecadal age-structured time series of Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) abundance in Lake Mvatn, Iceland, to infer the time-varying demographic response of the population to reduced harvest in the wake of the fishery's collapse. Our analysis shows that while survival probability of adults increased following the alleviation of harvesting pressure, per capita recruitment consistently declined over most of the study period, until the final three years when it began to increase. The countervailing demographic trends resulted in only limited directional change in the total population size and population growth rate. Rather, the population dynamics were dominated by large interannual variability and a shift towards an older age distribution. Our results are indicative of a slow recovery of the population after its collapse, despite the rising number of adults following relaxed harvest. This underscores the potential for heterogeneous demographic responses to management efforts due to the complex ecological context in which such efforts take place. The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author.