Has eutrophication promoted forage fish production in the Baltic Sea?

Abstract

Reducing anthropogenic nutrient inputs is a major policy goal for restoring good environmental status of coastal marine ecosystems. However, it is unclear to what extent reducing nutrients would also lower fish production and fisheries yields. Empirical examples of changes in nutrient loads and concurrent fish production can provide useful insights to this question. In this paper, we investigate to what extent a multi-fold increase in nutrient loads from the 1950s to 1980s enhanced forage fish production in the Baltic Sea. We use monitoring data on fish stock dynamics covering the period of the nutrient increase, combined with nutrient concentrations from a 3-dimensional coupled physical-biogeochemical ocean model. The results suggest that nutrient enrichment enhanced the biomass level of forage fish by up to 50 % in some years and areas due to increased body weight of fish. However, the trends in fish biomasses were generally decoupled from changes in nutrient concentrations.