Global Patterns Of Inland Freshwater Fisheries and Primary Production Using Multivariate Regression Meta-Analysis

There is a long history in fisheries management and ecology exploring the relationships between the primary production of lakes and the productivity of their fisheries.  Managers have developed empirical relationships to predict optimal fisheries harvests and guide policy.  Ecologists have collected data on nutrients, phytoplankton, and primary and secondary consumers (i.e., fish) to determine the relative importance of top-down and bottom-up trophic structuring.  Meanwhile, aquaculturists manipulate primary productivity to optimize farmed fish production.  We hypothesize that a more global synthesis between primary production, fisheries and local environmental and human variables may be revealed by combining the many studies from these inter-related disciplines using regression based meta-analysis.  We find substantial agreement that increased primary productivity increases fishery production across a variety of fishery types (e.g. recreational, commercial), and that variation in this positive relationship can be ascribed to readily available environmental variables such as regional climate.  These relationships should improve our ability to evaluate the cumulative economic role of the very large number of small inland fisheries relative to marine fisheries which are perceived to dominate fisheries production, and allow for more effective planning for continued sustainable development of global fisheries resources.