"Fish spawning habitat identification and spatiotemporal variability in a changing ocean"
Talk summary: "Rebecca Asch is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University where she also serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Applied Data Analytics (IADA) graduate certificate. In addition, Dr. Asch is an Associate Editor of the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series and a co-chair of the Joint ICES-PICES Working Group on Sustainable Pelagic Forage Communities. Her lab’s research focuses on the influences of climate change and climate variability on fish spawning habitat and fish early life history stages, with a particular interest in phenology. In this seminar, Asch will present three vignettes from her recent research. In the first segment, Asch will describe an NSF-funded project that has brought together multidecadal time series spanning from Baja California to the Gulf of Alaska to examine trade-offs in whether larval fishes respond to climate variability by shifting their geographic distribution, spawning phenology, or both. In the second portion of this seminar, Asch will use a Monte-Carlo based approach to examine whether the design of fisheries-independent time series has adequate precision and accuracy to detect changes in the spawning phenology of four small pelagic fish species. This method is generalizable and can be applied to any time series assessing phenological changes. Lastly, Asch will describe recent research into the offshore migration and spawning dynamics of southern flounder (Paralichthys lethostigma). This species has historically been the most commercially and recreationally valuable finfish in North Carolina, but catches have declined recently due to overfishing. Little is known about the whereabouts of this species after it migrates out of estuaries to spawn. Our research team combined acoustic telemetry, offshore ichthyoplankton surveys with DNA barcoding of fish eggs, larval dispersal modeling, and otolith microchemistry to learn new information about where this species goes during the offshore portion of its life history."
Coffee and snacks provided!