Modelling the Great Australian Bight Ecosystem

Ecological Effects and Ecosystem Shifts Caused by Mass Mortality Events on Early Life Stages of Fish

“…Our model analysis supports the view that cod as a species is resilient to MMEs, but found a longer impact duration than that of Durant et al (2008) and Ohlberger and Langangen (2015), and more similar to those found by Ainsworth et al (2018) in the Gulf of Mexico. Our modeled impacts are stronger than those modeled for oil spills in the Great Australian Bight (Fulton et al, 2018), but then again, our scenarios of 50% and 90% reduction in recruitment were higher than what was predicted in the Australian oil spill scenario. Also, we found significant impact on the fishery following a 50% recruitment reduction, which is a lower level than that explored by Ohlberger and Langangen (2015).…”

“…Complex models combining the ecology and human pressures of marine ecosystems are now being developed for many major sea and ocean areas, allowing researchers to explore the ecological effects as well as the species-specific responses of perturbations and changing pressures on marine ecosystems. Such models have been used e.g., to specifically explore the ecosystem-based fisheries management strategies for fisheries in Australia (Fulton et al, 2014) and the United States West coast (Kaplan et al, 2012;Kaplan and Marshall, 2016), but also the integrated effects of a range of human activities on the Great Australian Bight in general (Fulton et al, 2018), and future fisheries, protection and ocean acidification scenarios across a range of global ecosystems (Olsen et al, 2018). Ecosystem models have been used to evaluate the ecological effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (Ainsworth et al, 2018).…”

Climate-Related Vulnerability and Risk Assessment of Main Ocean Uses: An Overview

“…Curiously, only two publications addressed all ocean uses simultaneously. One of them focused on the modeling of the Great Australian Bight ecosystem (Fulton et al, 2018), while the other pertained to the use of open-source data for coastal risk assessments (Rumson and Hallett, 2018). As for references to ocean planning and management, or the blue economy, they were found only in a small subset of publications, corresponding to c. 18% and 28% of the total number of studies, respectively (Figure 1C).…”

Contrasting Futures for Australia’s Fisheries Stocks Under IPCC RCP8.5 Emissions – A Multi-Ecosystem Model Approach

“…Key Commonwealth fishery species that were predicted to see large positive increases in relative abundance due to climate change only, with moderate to high model confidence, included Australian sardine (regions 1 and 5), gemfish (region 1), and blue mackerel (region 5). Relative changes in abundance for Commercial species are provided in Table 4 while model projections and maps for all species are included in a technical report (Fulton et al, 2018a).…”