Marine regime shifts: drivers and impacts on ecosystems services

Abstract

Marine ecosystems can experience regime shifts, in which they shift from being organized around one set of mutually reinforcing structures and processes to another. Anthropogenic global change has broadly increased a wide variety of processes that can drive regime shifts. To assess the vulnerability of marine ecosystems to such shifts and their potential consequences, we reviewed the scientific literature for 13 types of marine regime shifts and used networks to conduct an analysis of co-occurrence of drivers and ecosystem service impacts. We found that regime shifts are caused by multiple drivers and have multiple consequences that co-occur in a non-random pattern. Drivers related to food production, climate change and coastal development are the most common co-occurring causes of regime shifts, while cultural services, biodiversity and primary production are the most common cluster of ecosystem services affected. These clusters prioritize sets of drivers for management and highlight the need for coordinated actions across multiple drivers and scales to reduce the risk of marine regime shifts. Managerial strategies are likely to fail if they only address well-understood or data-rich variables, and international cooperation and polycentric institutions will be critical to implement and coordinate action across the scales at which different drivers operate. By better understanding these underlying patterns, we hope to inform the development of managerial strategies to reduce the risk of high-impact marine regime shifts, especially for areas of the world where data are not available or monitoring programmes are not in place.

A quantitative framework for assessing ecological resilience

“…Although the location of the threshold might not be identified, relevant information would be obtained about which types of intervention are insufficient, or which may be required to nudge the ecosystem back to the predisturbance regime. However, Rocha et al (2015) showed that selected drivers causing regime shifts commonly cooccurred, and that these changes also affected common sets of ecosystem services across distinct marine ecosystems. This suggests that identification of management intervention for controlling drivers and conserving ecosystem services based on retrospective analysis can be complex.…”

Collective action and the risk of ecosystem regime shifts: insights from a laboratory experiment

“…Moreover, recent research suggests that the frequency and intensity of ecosystem regime shifts will increase as climate change becomes more drastic and other sources of anthropogenic forces become more acute (Steffen et al 2004, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, Rockström et al 2009). There is growing understanding about drivers of regime shifts, their impacts on ecosystems, and how those impacts link to human well-being (see, e.g., Scheffer et al 2001, Gordon et al 2008, Rocha et al 2015, and the Regime Shifts database, http:// www.regimeshifts.org, for an overview of case studies). However, empirical research on how people deal with the possibility that their actions may induce ecosystem regime shifts, affecting the flow of ecosystem services, has to our knowledge gained only little attention in the scientific literature.…”

An empirical model of the Baltic Sea reveals the importance of social dynamics for ecological regime shifts

“…Many marine ecosystems, for example, have undergone abrupt changes known as regime shifts (3,4). In one prominent case, the Baltic cod fishery suddenly changed in the 1980s from historically high cod biomass and catches (henceforth the "cod boom") to a sprat-dominant ecosystem with low cod abundance (5)(6)(7)(8).…”