An early life history approach to understanding marine fish population responses to environmental change

The successful development and implementation of ecosystem-based fishery management policies depends on understanding a broad range of environmental influences on stock productivity.  A novel approach of exploring environmental exposure-response dynamics during early ontogeny among Gulf of Alaska fish species seems to have good potential as a means of estimating early life history risk and resilience factors that initiate recruitment. The hypothesis is that we can utilize similarities in reproductive and early life history characteristics among species to identify 1) species groups that are pre-disposed to respond to environmental forcing in similar ways, and 2) plausible environmental predictors of recruitment variation.