Integrating innovative fish monitoring and data analysis to support management of aquatic ecosystems

Although innovative fish monitoring techniques allow to study previously unconsidered aspects of fish ecology and/or allow to collect data in a more efficient way, they also bring along new challenges in terms of data collection, analysis and interpretation. If the trade-off of methodological parameters is unknown, the uncertainty tied up with imperfect data not acknowledged, or the existing modelling frameworks inadequate, the ultimate benefit of including innovative techniques for monitoring and management programs might be limited. Although these issues in the scientific process are strongly interconnected, optimization efforts are often restricted to one aspect of the scientific process at a time. In this thesis a more holistic optimization approach was implemented and evaluated. It allowed to determine the repercussions of changes to the conceptual model, sampling design, data collection, and modelling framework on any other aspect and to set optimization priorities across all aspects. Methodological considerations of two rapidly advancing techniques, video monitoring and telemetry, were studied and used as case studies for the suggested approach. More specifically, the potential of video transects and passive acoustic telemetry networks to assess, respectively, the assemblage structure of coastal reef fish in the Galapagos and fish migration in the Scheldt estuary, was discussed