Satellite remote sensing for an ecosystem approach to fisheries management

Satellite remote sensing (SRS) of the marine environment has become instrumental in ecology for environmental monitoring and impact assessment and it is a promising tool for conservation issues. In the context of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAFM), global, daily, systematic, high-resolution images obtained from satellites constitute a major data source for the incorporation of habitat considerations into marine fish population dynamics. An overview of the most common SRS datasets available to fishery scientists and state-of-the-art data-processing methods are first presented, focusing on recently developed techniques for detecting mesoscale features, such as eddies, fronts, filaments, and river plumes of major importance in productivity enhancement and associated fish aggregation. Second, we provide a comprehensive review of remotely sensed data applications in fisheries over the past three decades for investigating the relationships between oceanographic conditions and marine resources. Third, we emphasize how synoptic and information-rich SRS data have become instrumental in ecological analyses at community and ecosystem scales. Finally, we demonstrate how SRS data, in conjunction with automated in situ data-acquisition systems, provide the scientific community with a major source of information for ecosystem modelling, a key tool for implementing an ecosystem approach to fisheries management