Population Genomics Applied to Fishery Management and Conservation

Abstract

In times of overfishing and climate change, marine resources are extremely vulnerable, and the vast majority of the world’s fish stocks have already collapsed. In this fragile context, the need to drive fisheries toward sustainability has become a priority. Population genomics methods, which compare DNA of individuals from different populations occupying distinct environments, are promising tools to address such need. Indeed, these methods provide new knowledge on the demographic and adaptive history of marine resources, which allows fisheries-specific issues to be resolved, so that delineation of stocks coincides with actual population boundaries and genetic diversity is maintained, ensuring the long-term sustainability of resources. In addition, the field of population genomics applied to fisheries management, or commonly referred to as “fisheries genomics,” has benefited from emerging molecular approaches that can now address fisheries management issues that could not previously be addressed. This genomics revolution is accompanied by an apparent increase in information and resolution on the main causes of marine population differentiation, which makes it possible to assess the persistence of marine species in the face of climate change and overfishing, two major threats at the heart of fisheries management issues. In this chapter, I synthesize information on empirical examples of the application of population genomics to fisheries and provide suggestions as to how modern population genomics approaches could address some of the most urgent challenges in fisheries management and conservation. I discuss the application of genomics to fishery management and conservation from four main angles: stock structure, climate change, forensics, and fishery-induced evolution.