Mapping cumulative human impacts to California Current marine ecosystems

Abstract

Quantitative assessment of the spatial patterns of all human uses of the oceans and their cumulative effects is needed for implementing ecosystem-based management, marine protected areas, and ocean zoning. Here, we apply methods developed to map cumulative impacts globally to the California Current using more comprehensive and higher-quality data for 25 human activities and 19 marine ecosystems. This analysis indicates where protection and threat mitigation are most needed in the California Current and reveals that coastal ecosystems near high human population density and the continental shelves off Oregon and Washington are the most heavily impacted, climate change is the top threat, and impacts from multiple threats are ubiquitous. Remarkably, these results were highly spatially correlated with the global results for this region (R 2 = 0.92), suggesting that the global model provides guidance to areas without local data or resources to conduct similar regional-scale analyses.

A Model Approach for Estimating Colony Size, Trends, and Habitat Associations of Burrow-Nesting Seabirds

“…Other highly impacted ecosystems identified by Halpern et al (2009) included salt marsh, beach, seagrass, and rocky intertidal.…”

“…In a second paper, Halpern et al (2009) focused on mapping these same cumulative impacts to California Current marine ecosystems with the goal of identifying the most and least impacted areas and the top threats to the region -this analysis included Puget Sound. However, results for Puget Sound proper were not discussed.…”

Novel Indicators of Anthropogenic Influence on Marine and Coastal Ecosystems

“…A major hurdle is a lack of data. Comprehensive, direct measures of human activities are available in only a few locations, and these are primarily only in developed countries (e.g., Halpern et al, 2009;Micheli et al, 2013;Andersen et al, 2015). Even in regions that might be considered data-rich, appropriate data are rare.…”

Persistence of hotspots and variability of seabird species richness and abundance in the southern California Current

“…Therefore, understanding trophic interactions within persistent seabird hotspots could benefit EBFM and development of harvest rules for forage fisheries. Third, marine spatial management in the CCE requires information on the distribution and connectivity of biological hotspots (Halpern et al 2009, Nur et al 2011, Santora et al 2011b, Adams et al 2012) in order to avoid potential negative interactions (e.g., seabirds and fishing vessels, oil spills; Hyrenbach et al 2000, Hooker and Gerber 2004, Lascelles et al 2012.…”