Natural mortality in fish populations during early life stages

The NAMOR workshop will bring together fisheries scientists from Norwegian and International institutions (15 researchers from four countries: USA, Russia, Germany, and Norway) to improve our understanding and predictions of fish productivity, geographical distribution, and resistance to climate change. Mortality of young fish (eggs and larvae) will be a main focus. The first goal of the workshop is to improve predictions of the number of new fish entering the fisheries by better understanding how climate change affects fish larvae. This prepares the ground for applying climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to study the effect of environmental change on survival of fish eggs and larvae. The second goal of the workshop is to develop and apply new methodology to understand how fish is constrained to different local environments depending on its age. Four topics will be pursued during the workshop: 1. Timing of key events during a fish's lifetime, spatial constraints 2. Change of mortality with location and age of the fish. 3. Predicting fish ecology in a future climate. 4. Is mortality lower for bigger individuals? These topics will form the basis for a series of manuscripts that are being prepared for discussion and publication during the NAMOR workshop in 2018.

The NAMOR workshop has the explicit aim to discuss and enhance the 5 manuscript drafts initiated during a workshop held in Oslo in September 2015. NAMOR will be structured along the lines of the Dahlem workshops, which have been successfully organized in Berlin since 1974. With NAMOR, we aim to improve our understanding and predictions of fish production, spatial distributions, and adaptability in relation to climate change, keeping a focus on fish early life history stages. We will as a first step outline the biophysical connections between fish early life history stages and the environment and define the environmental predictions needed to make robust projections of fish production in a changing climate. In doing so, we will generate capacity to downscale output of large-scale climate models to scales that are relevant for studying the biophysical processes affecting species survival through early life stages. We will also develop and apply new methodologies to identify and quantify the spatial constraints throughout a species entire life cycle. This effort will strengthen our ability to assess species adaptability to climate change. The NAMOR workshop will be a big step forward in merging and coordinating knowledge and we hope to shed new lights on the important but still little known early life history which vulnerability has strong impact on population production. The workshop and the output may also be an important contribution to future research directions. The workshop will be an important input to two MARINFORSK funded project CoDINA (255460) and OilCOM (255487) as well as other RCN-funded programs.