Ecological forecasts for marine resource management during climate extremes

Abstract

Forecasting weather has become commonplace, but as society faces novel and uncertain environmental conditions there is a critical need to forecast ecology. Forewarning of ecosystem conditions during climate extremes can support proactive decision-making, yet applications of ecological forecasts are still limited. We showcase the capacity for existing marine management tools to transition to a forecasting configuration and provide skilful ecological forecasts up to 12 months in advance. The management tools use ocean temperature anomalies to help mitigate whale entanglements and sea turtle bycatch, and we show that forecasts can forewarn of human-wildlife interactions caused by unprecedented climate extremes. We further show that regionally downscaled forecasts are not a necessity for ecological forecasting and can be less skilful than global forecasts if they have fewer ensemble members. Our results highlight capacity for ecological forecasts to be explored for regions without the infrastructure or capacity to regionally downscale, ultimately helping to improve marine resource management and climate adaptation globally.

Multi-month forecasts of marine heatwaves and ocean acidification extremes

“…The forecasts displayed in Figure 4 inspire plans to expand operational forecasting systems (e.g., psl.noaa.gov/marine-heatwaves/#forecasts, and https://www.mercatorocean.eu/en/category/mhw-bulletin/) to represent marine biogeochemistry, allowing for outlooks on extremes in key ecosystem stressors. Accurate forecasts of marine dynamics and extremes can better inform contemporary practices of marine managers, especially in a changing climate [8,41,42]. While our study does not make concrete policy recommendations, we hope that this work encourages the inclusion of biogeochemical and carbon cycle models in operational forecasts and seasonal outlooks that currently only include physical tracers.…”

Dynamically downscaled seasonal ocean forecasts for North American East Coast ecosystems

“…A larger ensemble size may also increase skill more if it was a multimodel ensemble, consisting of downscaled predictions forced by different models and/or using different models for downscaling, rather than just an ensemble of multiple runs from the same model. For example, Brodie et al (2023) found significantly higher skill in an ensemble of 73 members from 6 different coarse resolution models compared to a much smaller ensemble of 3 coarse or downscaled models.…”

“…Although dynamical downscaling offers the possibility of running multiple ensemble members to provide information about forecast uncertainty, the substantial computational cost of high resolution models used for downscaling has constrained the ensemble sizes of past climate downscaling efforts (Drenkard et al, 2021). In an analysis of seasonal forecasts for the California Current System, Brodie et al (2023) found that although a small ensemble of downscaled forecasts outperformed a subset of the same size from a much larger ensemble of coarse resolution forecasts, the full ensemble of coarse resolution forecasts outperformed the small downscaled ensemble. Furthermore, in some cases high ocean resolution has been found to actually degrade forecast skill (Sandery and Sakov, 2017;Thoppil et al, 2021).…”

Marine heatwaves redistribute pelagic fishing fleets

“…Furthermore, skilful forecasts of MHWs, with lead up times of 12 months, have recently become operational (Jacox et al, 2022) and can be integrated into our model framework to forecast future changes in fishing grounds. Such approaches can offer early warning to managers and fishing fleets at relevant time scales for decision-making (Brodie et al, 2023). Although existing adaptive strategies (e.g.…”