Abstract

Marine fish species are subject both to the effects of fishing and climate change that interact. Hence, long-term changes are observed in fish communities but disentangling climate and fishing effects remains challenging. However, there are very few studies of climate nor fishing effects on tropical fish community structure. Within this context, we compared the demersal fish community structure of the shrimp trawling grounds in 1993 - 1994 and in 2006 - 2007 from surveys at sea data sets get in F. Guiana, regarding the temporal variations of the sea surface temperatures and fishing effort changes. We identified an increase in the sea surface temperatures, a decrease of the fishing pressure on the continental shelf and a decrease of the total biomass of the sub-tropical species as compared to tropical ones. Challenge in F. Guiana is food security, facing the growth of the demand of the seafood products due to population growth. We advocate for adding a component to the bio-economic model of the small scale fisheries of F. Guiana previously built up that will relate the growth of population in terms of each species in the model to its biogeographic origin. Hence, we will be able to test scenarios of adaptation.

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