Postdoc, PhD

Katja Enberg

Man harvests fish stocks at increasing rate. Unfortunately, fisheries have lead to overharvesting and collapse of many harvested stocks worldwide. How can we help these stocks to recover, and what can we learn from these collapses and possible recoveries? Is it in the first place even possible to avoid such collapses, and harvest marine resources sustainably? Moreover, if we manage to achieve sustainability in the short term, what long term consequences will this 'sustainable harvesting' have? Is it also evolutionarily sustainable?

In my research I try to understand with the help of ecological, evolutionary, and statistical modelling how populations and species work. I explore the effects of fisheries, which has a tremendous effect on the survival of the targeted species: in many cases, fishing mortality exceed natural mortality manifold. It is self evident that such altered survival will affect target species in many ways. I am particularly interested in how fisheries affect 1) life-history traits, 2) population dynamics, and 3) evolutionary dynamics of the harvested species. I am also interested in the effects of environmental variability on population and evolutionary dynamics.

I started my career with fish with my MSc-thesis, in which I studied aggressive behaviour of juvenile salmonids (see papers on inter-population variation in aggressive behaviour and growth rate and social status and genetic variation). During my MSc studies I also spent 6 months in Imperial College, London, where I studied density-dependent growth with Kai Lorenzen. For my PhD-thesis I changed into more theoretical approach and studied various issues related to sustainable harvesting using population modelling: I explored harvesting strategies, multispecies harvesting, marine reserves, environmental fluctuations. For both MSc and PhD I studied at the University of Helsinki, Finland, under supervision of Anssi Laurila & Katriina Tiira (MSc) and Esa Ranta & Veijo Kaitala (PhD).

During my post doc at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, April 2006-March 2007) I became familiar with evolutionary and individual-based modelling. I was funded by the EU-project UNCOVER (UNderstanding the reCOVERy mechanisms of exploited stocks), and became affiliated also with the Marie Curie research training network FishACE. Currently I am funded by the Finnish Academy of Science, on a personal two-year grant for research abroad.