Project
Quantifying the impacts of climate change on growth, survival, recruitment and production to enable sustainable management of yellow perch in Lake Erie
Environmental change influences fish populations through multiple demographic pathways, yet most studies either assess overall productivity without identifying mechanisms or examine individual processes in isolation. Here, we develop a multi-model framework linking environmental changes in population productivity to specific demographic processes. The framework integrates models describing recruitment, somatic growth, natural mortality, and an environment-dependent surplus production model. We apply this approach to yellow perch (Perca flavescens) in Lake Erie, where recent decades have seen substantial environmental changes, including shorter winter ice cover and reduced nutrient loading. Both ice-on duration and nutrient loading were positively associated with population productivity. Ice-on duration primarily enhanced productivity via increased recruitment and adult growth, with partially offsetting increases in natural mortality. In contrast, nutrient loading showed consistent positive effects across pathways, including higher recruitment, lower natural mortality, and increased adult growth. The combined effects of ice-on duration and nutrient loading have reduced yellow perch maximum sustainable yield by 40% over 1975-2020. The proposed framework provides a structured approach for identifying the mechanisms linking environmental variability to fish population productivity.
Project Datasets
Code and input data for Lake Erie yellow perch analysis
This github repository contains the code and input data used in Xu et al. In review "A multi-model framework for evaluating and partitioning environmental change impacts on fish population dynamics: a case study with Lake Erie Yellow Perch