Underestimated barrier effects of ocean fronts shape global fishery distribution

Abstract Marine ecosystems exhibit high spatiotemporal heterogeneity, making it crucial to understand the mechanisms sustaining biological hotspots. Ocean fronts shape local biogeochemical processes and have long been recognized as biological hotspots aggregating organisms from phytoplankton to top predators and attracting fisheries (hotspot effects). However, fronts also exhibit pronounced environmental differences between their two sides (barrier effects), and how species and fishery distributions respond to these effects remains poorly understood. By integrating satellite-based front detection with commercial catch records, fishery-independent surveys, and global fishing datasets, we show that fishery distributions across diverse regions and major commercial stocks worldwide respond strongly to barrier effects, exhibiting 15–70% differences in distribution between the frontal warm and cold zones, driven by species-specific local thermal preferences. In contrast, responses to hotspot effects are generally sporadic with only 5–20% differences between frontal and non-frontal zones, and they emerge only when aggregations on one side of fronts offset avoidance on the other. This offset has led earlier studies to conservatively underestimate front-induced fishery variations by 55–75%. Our findings complement the traditional front-induced hotspot paradigm by clarifying the importance of barrier effects and underscore the need to reassess the role of ocean fronts in marine ecosystems.