Teleconnections to fisheries: A century-scale perspective on the linkages between climate, hydrography, fisheries recruitment in Chesapeake Bay, and Mid-Atlantic fisheries management

Improving our understanding of how climate variability influences fisheries recruitment and productivity is critically important to ongoing efforts to improve the state of global fisheries, especially considering the looming specter of future climate changes.  The Chesapeake Bay is an ideal coastal ecosystem to study climate-fishery linkages because: 1) it is one of the best monitored estuarine ecosystems in the world; 2) it serves as a critically important estuarine nursery area and feeding ground for many ecologically and economically important coastal Atlantic fish and shellfish populations; and 3) it is subject to pronounced annual climate fluctuations, as it straddles the boundary between continental and maritime climate provinces and is subject to contrasting polar and subtropical air masses.  In this talk we quantitatively illustrate the linkages that occur between hemispheric-scale teleconnections, synoptic-scale weather patterns, the Chesapeake’s estuarine hydrographic conditions, its springtime plankton community, and over a century of landings data for striped bass and Atlantic menhaden in the Chesapeake and Mid-Atlantic.