Report of the Workshop on Growth-increment Chronologies in Marine Fish: climate-ecosystem interactions in the North Atlantic 2 (WKGIC2)

Over the past several decades, thousands of otoliths, bivalve shells, and scales have been collected for the purposes of age determination and remain archived in European and North American fisheries laboratories. Advances in digital imaging and computer software combined with techniques developed by tree-ring scientists provide a means by which to extract additional levels of information in these calcified structures and generate annually resolved (one value per year), multidecadal time-series of population-level growth anomalies. Chemical and isotopic properties may also be extracted to provide additional information regarding the environmental conditions these organisms experienced. Given that they are exactly placed in time, chronologies can be directly compared to instrumental climate records, chronologies from other regions or species, or time-series of other biological phenomena. In this way, chronologies may be used to reconstruct historical ranges of environmental variability, identify climatic drivers of growth, establish linkages within and among species, and generate ecosystem-level indicators.