Main challenges of fisheries ecology in Iberoamerica

Abstract

The productivity and dynamics of fish stocks depend on their biological characteristics which, in interaction with the environment inhabited by the species, determine essential processes such as growth, reproduction, and natural mortality. Therefore, it is fundamental to understand their biology and their relationship with the environmental context, including both physical conditions and interactions with other species within the ecosystem. This knowledge makes it possible to adjust population dynamics models to the reality of ecosystems and to improve predictions under different environmental and fishing exploitation scenarios. Consequently, monitoring of biological and ecological processes constitutes the basis for assessing stock health and for sustainable fisheries management. Sustainable fisheries management, based on an ecosystem approach, leads to the conservation not only of the fishery resource itself, but of the entire socio-ecological system. In this context, the studies by Chura-Cruz et al. (2026), García et al. (2026), González-Castrillón and Dominguez-Petit (2026), Partida et al. (2026), and Rábade et al. (2026), published in the present special issue, contribute to expanding knowledge on species of high commercial or ecosystem importance whose biology has been little investigated...