Commercial fisheries as non-designed experiments

Abstract

Abstract Commercial fisheries data often lacks the controlled environment of traditional experiments. In this note, we explore the limitations and strengths of observational and quasi-experimental approaches in fisheries science, discussing the challenges of establishing causality, space-time pseudo-replication, and the impact of fishing-induced evolution.

Keywords

• assumption violation
• artificial selection
• experimental design
• pseudo-replication
• quasi-experiments