Humboldt (Northern) - Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries

Given the unique monitoring system in place in the region, the well understood climate variability and the developing ecological theory, the northern HCLME is a strong candidate for the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF). Routine physical (temperature, salinity), chemical (nutrients and oxygen) and biological (chlorophyll, zooplankton, exploited and non-exploited organisms) oceanographic information has been and continues to be collected. An even more intense monitoring programme is in place for the marine living resources. Evolving technical capabilities, including tagging and tracking individual animals (modern tags can also record environmental data), will go a long way to improving our knowledge of the abundance and distribution of the so-called charismatic and sometimes threatened species (i.e. seabirds, marine mammals, turtles, etc.). The final frontier lies in the mero and macro zooplankton (copepods, euphausiids, larger crustaceans, fish larvae) and smaller fish, especially their behavioural attributes (Chavez et al. 2008). Progress has been made in the case of macrozooplankton with the development of an acoustic method allowing for routine biomass estimation (Ballón et al., 2011).

Several activities have been carried out towards the implementation of EAF in Peru. Adaptive management has been implemented for the Peruvian purse-seine fishery on anchovy (Fréon et al., 2008). This approach is fully compatible and complementary to EAF since both approaches make use of the same pieces of information. More recently, the Fifth International Panel on the Anchoveta (Chávez et al., 2009) carried out further studies towards an ecosystem approach to fisheries in Perú. -Efforts were focused on testing the impact of the anchovy fishery on other components of the ecosystem using multispecies models and running an Ecological Risk Assessments (ERA) with a group of stakeholders. Perspectives include generating predictions of the environment and integrating the output from the ecosystem forecasts with bio-economic and higher trophic level models that would provide different harvest scenarios to optimise profits and ecosystem services.