Topics in Sustainability: Global Fisheries

The undergraduate class I'm co-teaching is getting into the part of the semester where each class is devoted to a major issue in sustainability. Topics we cover range from energy to hydrology to public health; with issues so large and time so limited each class can, at best, provide a very quick overview of the field and the major open problems in it. Given that I have to put together relevant and up-to-date background materials anyway, I figured I might as well put some links to all the materials on the blog for interested FE readers. Following RealClimate's Start Here page, I'm going to break the literature down a bit by target reader demographics so hopefully everyone will be able to find something interesting to chew on. Feel free to comment and give feedback as the topics go up; depending on how much use they get these posts might eventually turn into intermittently-updated pages.

On that note, let's begin with the first topic: Global Fisheries.

Readers with minimal technical background:

• National Geographic's 2010 Oceans issue, especially the article Seafood Crisis (also see, the 2007 NG article The Global Fisheries Crisis)
• A 2010 New York Times Magazine article on collapsing tuna fisheries which covers a lot of the main issues
• The Monterrey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch guides (also available as an iPhone app)
• Ocean 2012's video on overfishing

Readers with some science or technical knowledge:

• Pauly et al. Nature 2002, a mildly technical (and no-paywall) overview 
• Worm et al. Science 2009, nice recent overview article
• Pauly et al. Science 1998, fishing down the trophic chain (and a 2003 Nature article on the same)
• Watling and Norse, Conservation Biology 1998,  bottom trawling as the ocean's analog to clear-cutting
• Duarte et al. Science 2007, domestication of aquatic species (i.e., aquaculture) has progressed much faster than that of terrestrial species
• Swartz et al. PLoS One 2010, spatial expansion of fisheries since 1950

Readers interested in current research topics:

• Sumaila et al. J. of Bioeconomics 2010, overfishing may be driven by government subsidies
• Chassot et al. Ecology Letters 2010, empirical evidence that global marine primary production constrains catches
• Costello et al. Science 2008, catch shares as a global policy instrument 
• Branch et al. Nature 2010, the trouble with mean trophic level as a measure
• Pinsky et al. PNAS 2011, faster-reproducing ocean species collapse more quickly than slow ones under fishing pressure (opposite of the size / harvest pattern for most terrestrial species)
• Sethi et al. PNAS 2010, historical fishery development is driven by (...surprise?) profitability 
• Agnew et al. PLoS One 2009, a global estimate of illegal fishing activity