PhD Courses in Denmark

This course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of modern fisheries management, emphasizing both single-stock approaches and ecosystem effects. Students will learn to interpret ICES catch advice and perform basic stock assessments and fishing pressure projections using the R programming environment. Using scientific literature and hands-on modeling exercises, students will also learn to critically evaluate management advice considering biodiversity conservation challenges and formulate their own evidence-based recommendations for sustainable fisheries.

A student who has met the objectives of the course will be able to:

• Explain and compare the basic principles and practical applications of single-stock and ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management.
• Interpret and summarize the main content presented in ICES advice sheets.
• Adapt and implement R scripts to estimate stock size, calculate biological reference points, and simulate short-term catch scenarios.
• Reproduce the ICES advice for a given fish stock by locating relevant data and implementing the necessary modeling code.
• Compare Virtual Population Analysis with a statistical stock assessment model or propose alternative forecasting approaches accounting for additional drivers beyond the biomass of the spawning stock.
• Identify and synthesize current challenges at the intersection between fisheries management and biodiversity conservation
• Propose and defend practical strategies for implementing ecosystem-based fisheries management in a real-world fisheries context, addressing ecological, practical, and policy-related factors.
• Critically evaluate and apply scientific literature within the scope of the course to support evidence-based arguments related to fisheries management and sustainability.

Fisheries support many millions of livelihoods, provide food security, and contribute to national economies as well as coastal societies, but fisheries can also impact ecosystems negatively. For instance, fishing activities may disrupt food webs, damage the sea floor, or be responsible for the unintended captures of threatened marine animals. During the past decades, important effort has been made to develop the science and fisheries policies. In this course, we will study how fisheries scientists assess the size of fish stocks to produce stock-by-stock catch advice and how ecosystem considerations currently is moving up on the fisheries management agenda. We will look at concrete examples of fisheries management measures, including quota limits, time/area closures and actual Marine Protected Areas (MPA). The lectures will have a global perspective but will focus more closely on the North-East Atlantic and EU waters. The R programming language, being one of the most often used in ecology and fisheries science, will be used for the analytical parts of the course. The course program consists of (1) four modules covering the global perspective on fisheries, stock-by-stock assessments, and the ICES advice system, (2) four modules with analytical exercises in R, (3) four modules on the ecosystem approach to fisheries management, including a short legislative background and the tools available to managers to ensure fisheries sustainability and biodiversity conservation, and (4)Report assignment, in which students will apply the concepts and tools learned throughout the course to develop a management recommendation for a marine fish stock of their own choice. The students should find relevant scientific literature and data and select model approaches, and the result should be an evidence-based advice that considers stock dynamics, the fishery, and broader ecosystem or climate-related factors.