Ecological costs of climate change on marine predator–prey population distributions by 2050

Abstract

Identifying and quantifying the effects of climate change that alter the habitat overlap of marine predators and their prey population distributions is of great importance for the sustainable management of populations. This study uses Bayesian joint models with integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) to predict future spatial density distributions in the form of common spatial trends of predator-prey overlap in 2050 under the "business-as-usual, worst-case" climate change scenario. This was done for combinations of six mobile marine predator species (gray seal, harbor seal, harbor porpoise, common guillemot, black-legged kittiwake, and northern gannet) and two of their common prey species (herring and sandeels). A range of five explanatory variables that cover both physical and biological aspects of critical marine habitat were used as follows: bottom temperature, stratification, depth-averaged speed, net primary production, and maximum subsurface chlorophyll. Four different methods were explored to quantify relative ecological cost/benefits of climate change to the common spatial trends of predator-prey density distributions. All but one future joint model showed significant decreases in overall spatial percentage change. The most dramatic loss in predator-prey population overlap was shown by harbor seals with large declines in the common spatial trend for both prey species. On the positive side, both gannets and guillemots are projected to have localized regions with increased overlap with sandeels. Most joint predator-prey models showed large changes in centroid location, however the direction of change in centroids was not simply northwards, but mostly ranged from northwest to northeast. This approach can be very useful in informing the design of spatial management policies under climate change by using the potential differences in ecological costs to weigh up the trade-offs in decisions involving issues of large-scale spatial use of our oceans, such as marine protected areas, commercial fishing, and large-scale marine renewable developments.

Decadal changes in blood δ 13 C values, at-sea distribution, and weaning mass of southern elephant seals from Kerguelen Islands

“…Global climate change triggers deep modifications in a broad range of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and across a great variety of species [1,2]. Of particular concern are polar environments as climate change models predict that ocean warming should be especially intense at high latitudes with some likely large-scale consequences on the related marine ecosystems [3][4][5].…”

Use of Our Future Seas: Relevance of Spatial and Temporal Scale for Physical and Biological Indicators

“…Data provided from the unstructured grid coastal ocean model, FVCOM (Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model, Chen et al, 2003), using an implementation known as the Scottish Shelf Model (SSM, Wolf et al, 2016); for more information, see De Dominicis et al (2018). (Sherman et al, 2009) and a specific ecoregion (Spalding et al, 2007), but several studies demonstrate the need for detailed physical and biological understanding at a finer scale (Embling et al, 2012;Jones et al, 2014;Scales et al, 2017;Cox et al, 2018;Sadykova et al, 2020). The high hydrodynamic variability of some central North Sea areas, due to the large variability in duration of mixed and stratified conditions, described by van Leeuwen et al (2016), suggests the hypothesis that such areas might be characterized by a more heterogeneous spatial pattern on a finer scale.…”

“…In this review, we suggest making the direct use of physical (e.g., bottom temperature) and biological (e.g., net primary production) indicators, that will be impacted by both predicted climate change and large-scale ORE extraction (Boon et al, 2018;Sadykova et al, 2020; Figure 2). An indicator is a physical and/or biological ecosystem component, that could be seen described as an environmental predictor, a response, or a pressure but we choose to use the terminology "indicator" to describe ecosystem components that have been found to help predict ("indicate") habitat and/or ecosystem change over the last 30 years within the North Sea.…”

“…The North Sea has been considered as a coastal biome (Longhurst, 2010), a large marine ecosystem , future under "business as usual" (worst case) greenhouse-gas emissions scenario in 2050 from a mean of projected yearly outcomes from 2037 to 2062 (B,E) and difference between present and future (C,F) for bottom temperature (BT) and net primary production (NPP). Data provided from the Atlantic Margin Model 7 × 7 km (AMM7-NEMO) 3D baroclinic, hydrodynamic model, coupled with an ecosystem model ERSEM (Wakelin et al, 2015); for more information, see Sadykova et al (2020).…”

A review of the UK and British Channel Islands practical tidal stream energy resource

“…the habitats of foraging mobile animals) in locations of energy extraction and downstream of an array [20]. However, modelling studies indicate that these changes are likely to be relatively small compared with the impacts of climate change and the effects this will have on how animals are going to change the way they feed [110]. Similarly, the effects of energy extraction on predator-prey relationships are expected to be small relative to the impacts of climate change [80].…”