Analyse des déterminants environnementaux de la variabilité du recrutement - approche macroécologique appliquée aux populations exploitées du Nord-Est Atlantique

Recruitment - the number of young fishes that integrate each year the exploitable stock¿ has a central importance for stock dynamics. The high temporal variability in recruitment is a result of the environmental influence on survival during early life stages. Understanding the determinism of the influence of environment on recruitment remains one of the most important question in fisheries ecology. The present work aimed at answering some general questions about the influence of environment on fish recruitment using a macroecological approach. The study focused on the exploited fish populations of the Northeastern Atlantic. The first chapter of the thesis makes a review of the different methods used to estimate recruitment, compares recruitment estimates from these different methods, and discusses their reliability. Recruitment estimates from cohort analysis models, concerning more than 60 populations of 18 species, are finally retained to study recruitment variability. The second chapter presents the main concepts and the different approaches to the study of recruitment variability. A review of the major hypotheses concerning recruitment determinism is first made in order to detail the respective influence of environmental factors and of other factors on recruitment variability. The link between stock size and recruitment is then presented, based on the analysis of the data concerning the populations considered in this work. The chapter ends with a presentation of the different approaches used to study recruitment variability, and the justification of the choice of a macroecological approach. The third chapter analyses correlations in recruitment variations among Northeast Atlantic fish stocks, and shows the existence of groups of populations with synchronous recruitment variations. Such synchronies in recruitment correspond to similar responses of recruitment to environmental factors and hence indicate an environmental control of recruitment variations. The fourth chapter analyses the differences in recruitment variability among populations. Recruitment variability for populations living near the borders of species distribution ranges is higher than for populations living at the centre of these ranges. According to macroecological theories this pattern of recruitment variability within species geographical ranges suggests that populations on the border of species range are more strongly influenced by environmental variability than populations at the centre of the range. The fifth chapter investigates coherence between long term trends in recruitment and the changes in the North Atlantic climate during the last three decades. The dominant trend of recruitment variations for 40 populations, extracted by a principal component analysis, is strongly negatively correlated with the dominant signal in sea surface temperature in the North-East Atlantic, which is highly correlated to the global increase in temperature related to global warming. The chapter also suggests that the impact of the global warming on fish recruitment may depend on population position in species range.