Small pelagic fish: new research frontiers
Small pelagic fish (SPF) account for more than 30% by weight of the total landings of capture fisheries around the world and are crucial for global food security. SPF also play an important role in the transfer of energy in food webs through mid-trophic levels, so understanding processes affecting the dynamics of their populations, their role in marine ecosystems and how these shape robust management practices continues to be a high priority.

Substantial progress continues to be made on understanding the drivers and dynamics of SPF in marine ecosystems. The integration of numerical models with ever-growing data from monitoring efforts and stock assessments has enabled more comprehensive consideration of hypotheses describing SPF population variability. Additionally, the rapid development of new methods such as eDNA, machine learning, and genome analysis to ascertain population structure can offer new insight to long-standing questions. This TS includes contributions from the 2022 international (ICES, PICES, FAO) symposium on “Small Pelagic Fish: New Frontiers in Science for Sustainable Management” and highlight the state-of-the-art in these and other topics related to the ecology and sustainable management of SPF.

Organizers/Symposium conveners: Myron Peck, Ignacio Catalán, Susana Garrido, Ryan Rykaczewski, Akinori Takasuka

Editors: Myron Peck, Ignacio Catalán, Susana Garrido, Ryan Rykaczewski, Rebecca Asch, Jan McDowell, Elliott Hazen, Isaak Kaplan

Status: Submissions are open.

Individual Theme Section articles are published 'Advance View' as soon as they are ready. Once the Theme Section is completed, they will be fully published in a regular volume of MEPS and given a volume number and page range. Theme Section literature cites within the articles will also be updated at that time.