This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: From the 13th to the 16th century, herring from the Sound—the strait in the Baltic Sea between Denmark and Sweden—was one of northern Europe's most important trade goods. Salted herring from the so-called Skanör-Falsterbo fishery fed large parts of Europe.
Around 1570, however, the fishery collapsed rapidly, with far-reaching consequences for trade, politics and society. It took almost 400 years, until the 1950s, for catches to reach comparable levels again. An international team of fisheries economists, ecologists and historians led by Kiel University (CAU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) has investigated why a fishery that had been stable for centuries collapsed so suddenly.
The results show that declining herring stocks alone cannot explain it. The stock shrank markedly in the 16th century, but it did not collapse completely. Instead, the combined effects of environmental change, overfishing and social change brought the profitable fishery to a sudden end.
The study was published in Nature Sustainability. "Only when you look at climate, ecology and socioeconomic conditions together does a coherent picture of this historic collapse emerge," says first author Dr. Rudi Voss, a fisheries economist at iDiv and CAU.
"None of these factors alone would have brought the fishery down. It is their interplay that explains the dynamics." The study is based on a 450-year time series of herring catches in the Sound from 1200 to 1650. Researchers reconstructed it using fragmentary historical sources, including customs records, royal preemption rights ("kongekøb") and other archival material documenting trade volumes for individual years and locations.
They filled gaps in the data using economic and ecological indicators such as the availability of salt—the most important production factor for the herring industry at the time—and reconstructed climate data. The resulting dataset extends far beyond modern fishery stock time series, which typically span only a few decades. It allowed the researchers to study how climate change, economic crises and overexploitation played out over decades and centuries, and how these factors reinforced one another.
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