Opposing trends in survival and recruitment slow the recovery of a historically overexploited fishery

Quantifying temporal variation in demographic rates is a central goal of population ecology. In this study, we analyzed multidecadal age-structured time series Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) abundance Lake Mývatn, Iceland, to infer the time-varying response reduced harvest wake fishery’s collapse. Our analysis shows that while survival probability adults increased following alleviation harvesting pressure, per capita recruitment consistently declined over most study period, until final three years when it began increase. The countervailing trends resulted only limited directional change total size and growth rate. Rather, dynamics were dominated by large interannual variability shift towards an older age distribution. results are indicative slow recovery after its collapse, despite rising number relaxed harvest. This underscores potential for heterogeneous responses management efforts due complex ecological context which such take place.