Multispecies management: Species interactions and trade-offs, environmental changes and multiple pressures — Proceedings of the 19th Norwegian-Russian Symposium, Digital Meeting 4-5 June 2024, Bergen/Moscow/Murmansk/Tromsø

Abstract

The 19th Norwegian-Russian Symposium, entitled “Multispecies management: species interactions and trade-offs, environmental changes and multiple pressures”, was held as a fully remote digital meeting 4-5 June 2024. The Symposium had participation from several Russian and Norwegian institutions and was considered very successful. Multispecies management is a key concept in ecosystem-based fishery management, with consideration of ecological processes integrated so that management of a stock is seen in conjunction with other associated (or interacted) stocks. The concept was developed in the 1980s for the North and Barents Seas. Initially the focus was on understanding and quantifying interrelations between stocks and their relations to highly variable environmental conditions, and development of multispecies and ecosystem models. A related topic is management of mixed fisheries where different stocks are caught in the same fishery and where the effort on one stock practically affects the level of bycatch of other co-caught stocks. Trade-offs associated with setting optimal harvest levels for interacting stocks is another key aspect of multispecies management. More broadly the marine ecosystems are impacted by a range of different stressors, and a major challenge presently is understanding the cumulative effects of human pressures acting on harvested stocks and marine ecosystems under recent climatic changes. This again relates to management and trade-offs across economic sectors (such as fisheries, aquaculture, petroleum, etc.). The Symposium program included 4 theme sessions with 33 presentations. The theme sessions were coordinated by the nominees from the Russian and Norwegian parties: Session 1: Predation and competition. (Tore Haug / Andrey Dolgov) Session 2: Mixed fisheries and bycatch. (Bjarte Bogstad / Konstantin Sokolov) Session 3: Pressures on environment and ecosystems. (Harald Gjøsæter / Andrei Krovnin) Session 4: Multispecies and ecosystem modelling. (Elena Eriksen / Yury Kovalev) The Proceedings contain contributions in a mixture of formats. Some contributions were based on articles already published. For these, the submissions to Proceedings only include the abstract plus a link to the electronic version of the published article. Other contributions, based on new, unpublished data and meant for discussions at the Symposium, is included in the Proceedings in the format of a standard scientific article and contain totally up to 10 printed pages including text, figures and tables. In addition, good contributions based on new data and due to be published in scientific journals in the near future are represented with an extended abstract (1-2 pages) in the Proceedings. Bergen/Moscow/Murmansk/Tromsø, January 2025 The editors