Small pelagic fish (SPF) populations are well known to be subject to substantial changes in abundance over relatively short time periods – so called “boom and bust” population dynamics. Their dynamics can also be modulated by a wide variety of external drivers. These can range from basin-scale, e.g., El Niño events, to global-scale changes related to climate change, but they can also be local, e.g., the loss of a particular spawning ground for herring. External drivers can include both anthropogenic factors and natural changes. The key anthropogenic driver is probably fishing pressure, not only on the small pelagic species themselves, but also on their predators and potentially, their prey. Anthropogenic drivers can include less direct effects, e.g., climate change and obstruction of migration routes. Non-anthropogenic drivers can be divided into biotic and abiotic factors. Abiotic ones include not only changes in temperature and salinity, but also changes in small- or large-scale ocean circulation affecting spawning and nursery areas. Biotic factors can principally involve the abundance, quality and availability of prey, particularly at the sensitive life history stage, e.g., as larvae. Understanding the population dynamics of the predators may also help fisheries managers to more carefully project maximum sustainable yield population and fishing mortality targets.

In this session, we invite papers that investigate the population level responses of SPF to these and other external drivers. The session is focused, in particular, on early life history stages, from eggs through to recruitment, as well as growth before and after recruitment. However, contributions on the effect of external factors on other key elements of the ecophysiology of these species are also welcome, for instance, in terms of maturity development, fecundity, etc. Priority will be given to research that shows how changes in the population dynamics of SPF can be understood in the context of the ecosystems they occupy, and how those understandings can potentially improve our ability to manage and exploit these fisheries sustainably.

Small pelagic fish (SPF) feed on phyto- and zooplankton and are, at the same time, the main food source for many marine predators such as large fish, mammals and birds. Hence, they are important conduits of energy transfer. Because of their key position between plankton and top predators, those ecosystems in which SPF play a dominant role are called “wasp-waist” ecosystems. The overarching question of this session is: What do we know about the feeding habits of SPF on plankton and, in turn, what is known about the feeding habits of the fishes, seabirds, and mammals that feed upon SPF? To what degree are SPF and top predators selective feeders vs. generalists? Are there examples of top-down control by SPF on zooplankton and bottom-up control by SPF on top predators? How do feeding rates of predators compare to production rates of prey? Is foraging behavior of top predators influenced by the size of prey patches (or lack of patches)? What is the role of "hot spots" on foraging behavior of top predators? How are "hot spots" created and maintained? Considering multiple-scale spatial and temporal dynamics, what is known about temporal (decadal to seasonal) and spatial (meso- to micro-scale) variability in predator–prey dynamics, for example, seasonal matches or mismatches in prey production compared to when top predators migrate to an area to feed – are there times and places where the carrying capacity of the environment is exceeded due to too many predators or too few prey? How well do SPF meet the definition of the waist in a wasp-waist ecosystems? Can we identify impacts of climate change on SPF predator-prey interactions? Contributions from empirical as well as modelling studies are welcome.

The assessment of small pelagic fish (SPF) stocks offer a number of challenges related to the biology and ecology of this group of species. High reproductive potential and high and variable natural mortality, especially in early life stages, often imply large variability in recruitment. Together with the short life span of SPF, this means that population abundance is often largely dependent on recruitment strength and shows large fluctuations. SPF often exhibit complex migration dynamics, with different individuals having different migration capacity depending on their size and condition. In addition, SPF often demonstrate gregarious behavior which can be affected by population biomass. As the result, the availability of the individuals to the fleet changes with the abundance of the resource, creating changes in catchability which are difficult to account for. Some of these characteristics invalidate or challenge basic assumptions of assessment models commonly used for other stocks. SPF populations often show low coherence in relation to cohort abundance (the abundance of one year class and the next) and, when it exists, it is restricted to the few year classes that encompass the bulk of the fishery. Also, stock recruitment relationships are often not clear and show a large degree of autocorrelation, due to the large influence of one year recruitment in the next year biomass. Finally, it is common that there is a lack of relation (or, in some cases, an inverse relation) between catch per unit effort (CPUE) and abundance. These characteristics imply that age-structured models and medium-term predictions are often uncertain and in some cases biased. Alternative stock assessment models such as two-stage (recruits and adults) models have been attempted in several stocks, and often Bayesian methods have been used to facilitate the incorporation of uncertainty in the models. Under the uncertainties described above, the use of direct (fishery-independent) methods as tuning indexes or even as the main source for the assessment is considered crucial for a reliable stock assessment. Thus, acoustic as well as ichthyoplankton surveys have often been used to provide estimates of stock abundance, in some cases by developing specific methods such as the Daily or Annual Egg Production Method (DEPM, AEPM). In many cases indexes of next year recruitment have been attempted to facilitate short-term simulation and, therefore, management. Environmental indices and surveys of juvenile abundance are commonly used as advance indicators of recruitment strength in several stocks, although examples of misleading signals from these indices exist, and a consolidated time series together with some validation of the observed index is often required before it can be used for stock assessment and management purposes.

In this session, we invite papers covering all aspects related to the assessment of status of small pelagic stocks, as well as on short- and medium-term simulation of stock abundance, using any kind of indicator of future recruitment (from assumptions to environmental indices to juvenile surveys) and natural mortality. Discussion on benefits of different approaches to the assessment of stocks is expected.

Ecosystem based management of small pelagic fish (SPF), while presenting many of the same problems that exist in demersal fisheries also has additional issues specific to SPF species. Most obvious among these are issues raised by the tendency of SPF to “boom and bust” stock dynamics, and to the often large migrations undertaken by these species. There are also often substantial changes in spawning and recruitment that are modulated by environmental processes, including upwelling and other oceanographic processes, that need to be taken into account in the management to assist the significant economic and social systems these fisheries often support. It can be argued that what fisheries for SPF needs the most is to take account of environmental processes directly in assessment, and particularly in stock projections, but this means that we need to be able to establish these relationships with sufficient accuracy to be used in assessment models. An additional issue is that many SPF species are very short lived (e.g., sandeels and anchovy) and can often be subject to predominantly “recruit” fisheries. This puts a premium on management at a short time scale, i.e., in the year of assessment.

The role of many SPF as “forage fish” also requires different approaches to management. There is often a need to consider the requirement from these stocks of biomass to support higher trophic levels, including other commercial species, emphasizing the ecosystem support “goods and services” aspect of these species. While SPF often represent a valuable catch in themselves, they may also underpin the productivity of the potentially more valuable higher trophic level stocks. Indeed they may be an important prerequisite for some of those stocks to be able to be exploited at maximum sustainable yield.

All these issues represent challenges to management. In particular, the strong links between SPF and their environment and their role as forage fish makes them strong candidates for an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM). Most importantly, management needs to consider both the effects of ecosystem processes on stock productivity, and the combination of that productivity and exploitation on the rest of the ecosystem. The wide geographical range of SPF stocks, and their often substantial migrations, raises other issues for management that are less common in demersal fisheries, in particular when the distributions in space and time overlap many jurisdictions.

In this session, we invite papers on all aspects of management that focus on the specifics of SPF species. These can cover SPF fisheries ranging from full-scale industrial fisheries to small-scale or artisanal fisheries. In particular, we encourage contributions on: (i) the inclusion of ecosystem elements directly in assessment and management; (ii) the management of short-lived species and recruit-based fisheries, especially in the context of minimizing the impacts on social and economic systems; (iii) the management of SPF species in the context of their role as "forage fish" and their role in the food web; and (iv) cross-jurisdictional management in the context of wide distributions and substantial migrations.

Small pelagic fish (SPF) fisheries have a high economic value because of their use for human consumption and production of fish meal and fish oil, and their pivotal role in sustaining fisheries for large predators. They are significant in terms of future global food security, particularly for the economy, diet and livelihoods of communities in the developing world, and for the well-being of villages, regions and even entire countries. In many parts of the world these fisheries have a significant history, with century-old techniques, norms, cultural practices and values. As SPF are exploited by small-scale as well as industrial fisheries, a balance has to be kept between both sectors. A third of global fisheries production, mainly from SPF, is used to produce the largest marine-based commodity, fish meal and oil, and the fishery for Peruvian anchovy alone contributes about 50% of the global total. Aquaculture, the fastest growing food production system worldwide, utilizes about 70% and 90% of fish meal and fish oil production, respectively, exerting a growing pressure on SPF fisheries. At the same time, SPF fisheries are variable and at the mercy of environmental and climate variability and change, which pose pressure and challenges to their management. Governance poses an additional challenge as SPF are migratory and are often shared stocks, asking for regional governance instead of the more common national management.

In this session, papers are invited on a large range of socio-economic and institutional topics which include: (i) food security and nutrition, (ii) governance, (iii) institutional analysis, (iv) economic viability analysis, (v) social and economic consequences of the impacts of climate change on SPF, (vi) analysis of fisheries policies, (vii) livelihoods, (viii) SPF culture, (ix) Social-Ecological Systems approach, (x) capacity building for global changes, (xi) traditional and cultural value, (xii) resilience of coastal communities, (xiii) utilization of pelagic fish resources, and (xiv) conflict.

Small pelagic fish (SPF) are essential prey species for a variety of predators and can also be culturally, commercially, and recreationally important. The abundance of SPF populations is highly variable both in space and time, attributes which complicate sampling, forecasts and retrospective analyses related to recruitment. Population abundance is affected by environmental conditions, system productivity, and the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, as well as by a variety of factors influencing survival and recruitment to the adult population. Understanding what factors affect the abundance, recruitment, age structure, size, condition, and distribution of SPF presents a challenge to the assessment of these species. Increased attention has been paid to the importance of pelagic fishes and the need understand their dynamics and responses to environmental conditions and their role within trophic food webs and ecosystems. Surveys and assessments for some stocks and species are often undeveloped, and important life history attributes remain unknown. Improved information on SPF is required to characterize their role in the ecosystem and advance both species-specific assessments as well as ecosystem models.

The goals this 0.5-day workshop are to: (1) identify and compare the efficacy of various survey assessment methods, and how to incorporate survey information into modeled assessments, and (2) pinpoint ongoing surveys and information for pelagic fishes and to discuss opportunities for sharing data, technologies, and advancing survey and assessment efforts directed towards these fish. Workshop participants will discuss the following topics:

• Comparisons of field sampling techniques, including acoustics, biological sampling, net sampling, and alternate techniques;
• How best to integrate estimates of abundance, distribution, recruitment, etc. into stock assessment models. The idea will be to openly discuss how to incorporate any information useful for assessment (not only abundance indexes) into models (not necessarily traditional stock assessment models) that could be useful to assess the status of the stocks.
• Archiving of current state of knowledge on abundance, age structure, life history attributes, and distribution for a variety of important pelagic fish species.

The workshop format will include presentations and a discussion. There will be one or two keynote speakers and several brief presentations (5-10 minutes each), followed by a discussion. For the brief presentations, we invite papers on the topics listed above. Prior to the workshop, speakers will be asked to address in their presentations pre-defined questions that will lead to and facilitate discussion. After the workshop, participants are encouraged to attend the W7 workshop, as this is a continuation of the theme in the W2 workshop.

Indigenous people, sports fishers, and other members of the general public on the West Coast are very interested in the well-being of forage fish populations. It is often unclear how development and implementation of management policies interface with these user and interest groups, though diverse social aspects of fisheries management are being increasingly recognized (e.g., Urquhart et al., 2014), as are the influence of institutional culture (ICES, 2016) and the challenge of management in a multi-stakeholder environment.

This 0.5-day workshop will complement the socio-ecological exploration of Session 6 of the symposium through discussion of an invited panel and the audience to address the question of “how does policy translate to the community?”. The case study examined will be for herring on the coast of British Columbia, exploring disparate institutional and stakeholder points of view – in particular pathways for traditional alternatives in management, citizen contributions to conservation and management strategies, and interfaces with management decision makers. The panel will include representatives of academia, resource management, First Nations, Non-profit Organizations, and commercial and sport fishing, and will count on audience participation in discussion. The expected products include: (1) a workshop report and (2) guidance points for improved synergy amongst management decision makers, both western and First Nations, institutional science and citizen scientists.

Recent improvements in ocean model spatial resolution and data assimilation techniques have enabled more realistic simulations of larval fish transport and distributions (e.g., Ospina-Alvarez et al., 2015). Full life-cycle migratory fish models have also been developed using high-resolution circulation models (e.g., Rose et al., 2015; Fiechter et al., 2015). However, knowledge gaps in the behavior of migratory fish limits our ability to improve their simulation. Fish behavior is a consequence of genetics, environmental responses, prey availability, competition and interaction with other species, predator avoidance, maturity and learned behavior. All these factors lead to complex behavior patterns. Enhancements in remote sensing, modeling techniques, tagging technologies for fish, otolith and genetic analyses are contributing to our understanding of fish migration patterns.

The purpose of this 0.5-day workshop is to synthesize the current state-of-the-science in modeling of migratory fish behavior and their spatial distribution and to identify remaining challenges. Presentations are encouraged to discuss successes and failures in the modeling of migratory fish. Papers related to data availability to evaluate fish behavior models as well as laboratory and experimental approaches are desired. The anticipated outcomes include: (1) a workshop report, (2) a white paper on the challenges of migratory fish modeling and (3) a peer-reviewed manuscript, if sufficient new ideas emerge.

Large fluctuations and oscillations in small pelagic fishes (SPF) appear governed by changes in a variety of extrinsic (environmental) factors causing species-specific differences in growth and survival. These patterns arise, in part, due to intrinsic (ecophysiological) differences among species. Given the strong link between the productivity of SPF and changes in bottom-up forcing, advancing knowledge on species-specific differences in growth physiology and bioenergetics will greatly advance a cause-and-effect understanding of the mechanisms underlying changes in the distribution, reproduction, and growth of these fishes (Peck et al. 2013). Importantly, this ecophysiological knowledge can be used to parameterize mechanistic foraging and growth models to project how the distribution and productivity of species may be altered in a future climate (Hollowed et al. 2009, Pörtner and Peck 2010). A key step to projecting climate impacts is to clarify the relationship between temperature and dynamic rates that structure trophic interactions (Kristiansen et al. 2007, Hollowed et al. 2009, Rijnsdorp et al. 2009).

Recent advances have occurred in laboratory, field and modelling studies on SPF which need to be discussed, compared and integrated. For example, successful (re-) emphasis on maintaining small pelagic brood stocks has promoted new laboratory research on larvae (e.g., European sardine - Caldeira et al. 2015, Garrido et al. 2015). At the same time, individual-based, mass-balance, and ecosystem/food-web models are continually being improved and now provide a suite of modeling frameworks for projecting climate-driven changes in the distribution, productivity, and trophic interactions of small pelagic fishes. For example, Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models have been created to include additional aspects of life history strategy such as changes in allocation to growth and/or reproduction in response to changes in key environmental features. These physiology-based models can inform advice on the management of small pelagic fishes and their habitats under future climate change if outputs can be incorporated in management models and frameworks.

This 0.5-day workshop will focus on:

• physiological responses of SPF to climate-driven abiotic factors and quantitative, life-stage specific comparison of well-studied species;
• existing datasets and parameterization for bioenergetics modeling of growth, foraging and movement;
• data needs for bioenergetics-based modeling approaches to better project the distribution, foraging and growth of small pelagic fishes.

The expected outcomes include: (1) a workshop report and (2) a review paper and/or themed set of articles discussing:

• recent advances in understanding of foraging and growth dynamics in SPF;
• comparison of ecophysiological thresholds for feeding, growth, survival;
• environmental controls on the allocation of energy to reproduction;
• emerging research needs to enhance our capacity to project population dynamics.

Various remote-sensing methods have been proposed to understand variability in harvest fisheries, to improve catch per unit effort, and to explore potential impacts of climate change on future fisheries (Fernandes et al. 2015). Remote sensing applications include potential fishing zone advisories; studies to understand the link between phytoplankton phenology and fisheries recruitment (testing the match-mismatch hypothesis of Hjort-Cushing) (Platt et al. 2003; Koeller et al. 2009) and links between phytoplankton community structure and fisheries. One may anticipate that such applications would work best for small pelagics, because of the shorter interval between the trophic level of remote-sensing observations (phytoplankton) and the fisheries, and also because of the shorter time scales involved.

This 1-day workshop is designed to:

• discuss recent progress in the use of satellite data to improve our knowledge of fisheries variability;
• explore the use of satellite data to improve fisheries models;
• investigate the use of satellite data to improve fisheries management;
• investigate the use of satellite data for high seas governance of fisheries;
• assess the use of remote sensing in socio-economic studies related to fisheries fluctuations; and
• plan a symposium on the topic of remote sensing and fisheries.

In 2010, India hosted the first symposium on “Societal Applications in Fisheries and Aquaculture using Remotely-sensed Imagery (SAFARI)”. Selected papers from the symposium were published subsequently as a special issue of the ICES Journal of Marine Science (Stuart et al. 2011). India is now in the initial stages of planning a second SAFARI symposium in the last semester of 2017. The workshop will serve as a precursor to the second SAFARI symposium, and help plan it.

Simulation approaches like management strategy evaluation are useful for testing harvest control rules on forage species, but these methods are hampered by a lack of information about forage fish dynamics. They may be improved, however, by incorporating data from other ecosystem components. For example, realistic dynamics for forage fish in the Pacific may be generated by incorporating oceanographic variables like temperature or food availability (Lindegren et al. 2013), catches, or predator indicators, or they may benefit from the use of time series approaches like non-linear forecasting (Sugihara 1994). Additionally, data availability and ecosystem function of small pelagic fish (SPF) are likely to vary across the Pacific.

This 0.5-day workshop will solicit input from experts in forage fish oceanography, ecology, and stock assessment and attempt to address the following questions: (1) What processes can be/should be used to generate realistic SPF population fluctuations over time within simulations? and (2) How does the importance of these variables and our ability to incorporate them in simulation models vary among the ecosystems where SPFs occur (Kuroshio/Oyashio Currents, Humboldt Current, and California Current)? Through group discussion, we plan to develop a set of guidelines for simulating realistic forage fish dynamics for different locations and life history types, which can be used by managers and ecologists to test harvest strategies. Other anticipated outcomes are: a workshop report to be distributed to PICES and ICES and a review paper discussing the simulation approaches currently in use and the challenges management strategy evaluation for small pelagics.