Description

The status of marine fish stocks needs to be assessed to ensure fishing practices that exploit the stocks at sustainable levels. Traditional methods to assess the state of fish stocks through scientific surveys have experienced a very slow progress and present recognized shortcomings, including a high economic cost coupled with complex logistics, very sparse data in space and time as a direct consequence and a long-time required to treat and analyze the collected data. Next-generation DNA high throughput sequencing (HTS) methodologies provide now the possibility to complement traditional methods and resolve some of these challenges to assist fisheries assessment. The objectives of this project is to test the capacity of a set of novel HTS methods, including Close-Kin Mark-Recapture; RAD-Seq; epigenetic age determination or environmental DNA to support faster and cheaper fish stocks’ assessments and biodiversity analyses of marine fish assemblages.