Synergistic effects of harvest and climate drive synchronous somatic growth within key New Zealand fisheries

Abstract

Fisheries harvest has pervasive impacts on wild fish populations, including the truncation of size and age structures, altered population dynamics and density, and modified habitat and assemblage composition. Understanding the degree to which harvest-induced impacts increase the sensitivity of individuals, populations and ultimately species to environmental change is essential to ensuring sustainable fisheries management in a rapidly changing world. Here we generated multiple long-term (44–62 years), annually resolved, somatic growth chronologies of four commercially important fishes from New Zealand's coastal and shelf waters. We used these novel data to investigate how regional- and basin-..