Multiscale Environmental Forcing of Multispecies Fishery Dynamics Across Climate Timescales

ABSTRACT

Fisheries management often relies on single‐species assessments, overlooking multispecies dynamics while facing the added challenge of nonlinear environmental variability. Marine landings of most commercially exploited species in the Southwestern Atlantic have declined for decades and are projected to decrease further under climate change, as ocean warming is expected to reduce fisheries catches and revenues. Despite these trends, multispecies studies linking regional landings to environmental forcing remain scarce. Addressing this gap, we propose an integrated approach to examine multiscale environmental influence on fisheries landings within the Argentinean–Uruguayan Common Fishing Zone, a complex hydrographic region strongly influenced by the Río de la Plata discharge. We applied time‐series alignment and latent factor modeling to identify common patterns across multivariate landing series. These patterns served as response variables in lagged generalized linear and additive models, incorporating as predictors: riverine runoff, sea surface temperature, salinity, and turbidity, wind mixing, and large‐scale climatic indices such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). Time‐lagged analyses show that environmental forcing at local and basin scales explains much landings variability. Turbidity and salinity were the most consistently retained variables, while the best‐fitting model (82% deviance explained) incorporated the combined effects of SAM and turbidity. Our findings demonstrate that diverse fisheries landings can be summarized into common multivariate patterns, which in turn can be linked to multiscale environmental forcing. This provides a robust basis for climate‐informed management, supporting a transition from isolated single‐species assessments to integrated multispecies frameworks.