Review of the fisheries indicators for monitoring the impacts of fishing on fish communities

The high demand for fish products has led to important economic issues including the emergence of new markets, especially in developing countries where fishing represents an important economic sector and the main source of animal protein for local communities. The worldwide fisheries have overall passed their peak and many stocks are overfished despite the increasing efforts towards the developpement of fisheries assessment and management tools using global and analytical models. These complex models used for fisheries management, especially in many developing countries, require large amounts of data whose collection and analysis are very costly and expensive. The current studies of the effects of overexploitation on fish communities use an indicator-based approach as an alternative to improve the assessment and management of the fisheries resources. This latter approach is cheaper, simpler and more efficient to establish a link between disruption and its effect on a biotic component. The currently most commonly used indicators have provided successfully results in many studies cases carried out on fish communities. Thus, management approaches based on indicators in the recent years has improved our understanding of the structure and functioning of ecosystems, and therefore, facilitated the interpretation of biological phenomena