Fish Age and Growth in a Changing World: Methods, Applications, and Future Directions

Age and growth research provides one of the most fundamental foundations in fish biology, fisheries assessment, and aquatic ecology. Age estimates and growth data are crucial for calculating key population parameters such as mortality, productivity, recruitment, longevity, and resilience—metrics that underpin stock assessments, ecosystem-based management, and conservation planning. Over recent decades, major progress has been achieved in age determination techniques, growth modeling, and analytical tools, enabling a deeper understanding of fish population dynamics across marine and freshwater ecosystems. Yet critical knowledge gaps persist for many species, populations, and regions, and emerging environmental challenges are reshaping life-history patterns and growth variability worldwide.

Rapid environmental change, habitat degradation, and increasing human pressures are altering growth rates, demographic structures, and life-history traits of fish populations. At the same time, new technological advances - including otolith chemistry, image analysis, automated ageing, machine learning, Bayesian approaches, and other modern statistical frameworks - have expanded possibilities for more precise and efficient age estimation and growth modeling. Complementary behavioural methods, such as telemetry, may also provide opportunities to link individual movement and habitat-use patterns with subsequent analyses of age and growth. However, the integration of these methodological advances with practical applications in fisheries assessment, conservation, and ecosystem management remains limited. To address these gaps, interdisciplinary collaboration among fisheries biologists, ecologists, behavioural scientists, and quantitative researchers is urgently needed to strengthen the use of age and growth information for sustainable management under changing environmental conditions.

This Research Topic welcomes original research, reviews, methods papers, and perspectives related to the study of fish age and growth. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

- Age determination and validation: otoliths, scales, vertebrae, spines, and fin rays; precision, accuracy, and validation studies.

- Growth modeling and analytical developments: von Bertalanffy and alternative growth models, length-frequency approaches, back-calculation techniques, and statistical and computational innovations.

- Applications in fisheries and management: integrating age and growth data into stock assessments, mortality estimation, recruitment analysis, and conservation strategies.

- Environmental influences on growth: impacts of climate change, habitat degradation, and life-history plasticity across spatial and temporal scales.

- Integration of age and growth information with behavioural observations and telemetry data.

- Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies: linking age and growth patterns across taxa, ecosystems, and management contexts.

By synthesizing methodological advances and ecological applications, this Research Topic aims to broaden our understanding of fish growth processes, improve the reliability of ageing methods, and highlight how robust age and growth data can inform evidence-based management and conservation of aquatic resources in a rapidly changing world.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: worth including: otolith, sclerochronology, somatic growth, von Bertalanffy, stock assessment, climate change, age validation, life history

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.