Where has all the recruitment research gone, long time passing?

ICES Journal of Marine Science ICES Journal of Marine Science (2014), 71(8), 2293– 2299. doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsu158 Contribution to the Special Issue: ‘Commemorating 100 years since Hjort’s 1914 treatise on fluctuations in the great fisheries of northern Europe’ Where we are going Food for Thought Where has all the recruitment research gone, long time passing? Jake Rice 1* and Howard I. Browman 2 1 Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 200 Kent Street, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1A 0E6 Institute of Marine Research, Austevoll Research Station, Marine Ecosystem Acoustics Group, 5392 Storebø, Norway 2 *Corresponding author: tel: +1 613 990 0288; e-mail: Rice, J., and Browman, H. I. Where has all the recruitment research gone, long time passing?. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 71: 2293 –2299. Received 15 August 2014; accepted 18 August 2014; advance access publication 8 September 2014. For most of the past 100 years, research into recruitment processes—as pioneered by Johan Hjort—has been a consistent focus of research in fisheries science. This was reflected not only in the literature but in the organizational structures and research strategies of national and international fisheries research and management institutions. Over the past decade or so, we perceived that recruitment research is fading, if not into obscurity then at least into a more marginal place in fisheries and marine research. In this paper, we assess if our perception is real by quantifying trends in scientific publications and in the work activities within ICES during specific periods extending back to the 1920s. Our analysis documents a decline in research on recruitment processes. We put forward three possible hypotheses to explain this decline: 1. All the key research questions about recruitment have been answered; 2. The volume of research on recruitment processes has declined because the answers are no longer relevant; 3. Recruitment research has been co-opted by more trendy, possibly ephemeral, and research topics. There is little evidence to support the first two of these hypotheses and we consider the third to be the most plausible. Finally, we conclude that this new terminology/repackaging of recruitment research does not bring with it new and fresh thinking and, therefore, comes at a cost that should be carefully considered. Keywords: climate change, ecosystem-based management, fish population dynamics, integrated assessments, Johan Hjort, recruitment variability, research prioritization in marine science. Introduction Johan Hjort studied the processes driving recruitment and population dynamics of fish, and his benchmark publication (Hjort, 1914) has provided a foundation and impetus for 100 years of research. The penetration and influence of Hjort’s (1914) treatise has been remarkable (Aksnes and Browman, 2014). One century after its publication, it continues to be cited frequently, with citations having appeared in over 150 journals covering fisheries (22 journals), marine science (71), general ecology (23), general science (35), statistics and modelling (5), and even fields as distant as biomedicine. For most of the past 100 years, recruitment processes has been a consistent focus of research in fisheries science. This was reflected not only in the literature but in the organizational structures and research strategies of national and international fisheries research and management institutions. Over the past decade or so, we perceived that recruitment research is fading, if not into obscurity then at least into a more marginal place in fisheries and marine research. “Recruitment” has become a modifier, or dependent clause, describing research that has some other focus, commonly something current such as climate change, the “ecosystem approach” or “integrated assessments”. We interpret this observation to reflect a basic change in what is driving marine research—in the past, the driver was mainly bottom-up: the curiosity, ideas, and hypotheses of scientists determined what research was conducted. In the present, the driver is mainly top-down: large international government organizations and non-governmental advocacy groups drive research questions by allocating research funding in a short-term socioeconomic and political framework and this determines what research is conducted. We will take up this change in what is driving the foci of our research activities elsewhere. Adoption of the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management (EBFM) was intended—at least conceptually —to significantly # 2014 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: 2294 broaden the information, biophysical processes, and ecological concepts taken into account in the management of living resources. Hence, EBFM is at least a possible cause of a shift in the focus of fisheries research. According to FAO (1995, 2003), one of the basic pillars of EBFM is to take environmental drivers of stock dynamics into account. However, this emphasis on environmental drivers might have either increased the importance of recruitment research as a key pathway through which the drivers are experienced, or decreased its importance through empowering many other ecosystem factors to share the research spotlight with recruitment research. It is noteworthy that EBFM was adopted by national and international marine resource management institutions by mandate from the very top levels of international policy making (Browman and Stergiou, 2004, 2005). EBFM was adopted before most “bench-level” researchers actually knew what it was. What it actually is has yet to be completely worked out (it would not surprise us if we move on to something else before that actually happens—see Link and Browman, 2014). We view this is a seminal example of top-down-driven marine science. Climate change and high-profile offshoots such as ocean acidification are also deflecting the focus away from recruitment research, although again recruitment processes may be one of the common ways that climate effects are manifested in population and ecosystem dynamics. In this essay, we first ask if the repackaging of recruitment research that we describe above is real. We assess this by quantifying trends in scientific publications and in the work activities within ICES during specific periods extending back to the 1920s. We then asked what the drivers of this trend are, and what the influence of those drivers on fisheries research might be. We also discuss whether this trend should be considered a good thing in that it represents a divesting of a century-old framework of hypotheses for understanding recruitment variability that has proved increasingly cumbersome and unhelpful or, alternately, that it is not such a good thing because it has resulted in a loss of focus on questions that are at the very heart of fisheries research (see Hare, 2014). Methods Orientation. Our obje (...truncated)