Motivation

Today, climate change is considered a prime concern when it comes to the future management of the World's fisheries resources. In the 2005 review of global fisheries resources from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO) climate variability and its potential impact on fisheries received special attention. In modern fisheries, the climate is seen as a highly important factor influencing the overall fluctuations of many fish stocks. One of the problems facing fisheries managers is the task of distinguishing between the pressure caused by fishing and climatic variability, when analysing changes in modern fish stocks. Moreover, with the pressing issue of possible global warming, knowledge of the past effects of climate change may provide information for the management of future fish stocks. As worded in another recent publication from FAO; ‘The dilemma is how to cope with the uncertainty of future climate changes. Lessons from the past seem a good place to start’. Even if managers cannot simply project past trajectories into the future, lessons from the past still seem one way of informing us about the future of ecosystems.

This book presents an investigation of how natural variability in the North Atlantic area, and more specifically in the North Sea, may have affected the productivity of North Sea herring stocks and the recruitment of fish egs and larvae into these. An assessment of this factor is made possible through indepth studies of the temporal and spatial variations in North Sea herring fluctuations from the pre-statistical era, when marine science was still in its embryonic stages.

We also need to look to the past to increase our understanding of society's interaction with the environment. In current debates on environmental is-sues, the starting point or baseline for scientifically-based arguments is often the time when a specific method or instrumental signal was first recorded. In the area of fisheries, the baseline for modern research is often no more than a generation, thus leaving the more distant past shrouded in darkness. This book proposes that marine environmental history is a means of shifting the baseline further back in time, shedding light onto past marine ecosystems in order to gain a better perspective on present ecosystems.