Skilful decadal-scale prediction of fish habitat and distribution shifts

Abstract

Many fish and marine organisms are responding to our planet’s changing climate by shifting their distribution. Such shifts can drive international conflicts and are highly problematic for the communities and businesses that depend on these living marine resources. Advances in climate prediction mean that in some regions the drivers of these shifts can be forecast up to a decade ahead, although forecasts of distribution shifts on this critical time-scale, while highly sought after by stakeholders, have yet to materialise. Here, we demonstrate the application of decadal-scale climate predictions to the habitat and distribution of marine fish species. We show statistically significant forecast skill of individual years that outperform baseline forecasts 3–10 years ahead; forecasts of multi-year averages perform even better, yielding correlation coefficients in excess of 0.90 in some cases. We also demonstrate that the habitat shifts underlying conflicts over Atlantic mackerel fishing rights could have been foreseen. Our results show that climate predictions can provide information of direct relevance to stakeholders on the decadal-scale. This tool will be critical in foreseeing, adapting to and coping with the challenges of a changing future climate, particularly in the most ocean-dependent nations and communities.

Integrating human dimensions in decadal-scale prediction for marine social–ecological systems: lighting the grey zone

“…Nevertheless, improved methods to link environmental variability to ecological change and rapidly developing capacity to draw on Big Data has helped ecologists and managers better understand mechanisms of ecological predictability (Séférian et al, 2014) and develop initial pioneering applications (e.g. Franklin et al, 2017;Koul et al, 2021;Payne et al, 2022).…”

“…Furthermore, decadal predictions may improve users' ability to foresee potential conflicts and undesirable circumstances, and to act to de-escalate before they become entrenched. For instance, such predictions could have helped foresee and avoid the recent conflicts over Atlantic mackerel fishing rights (between European Union countries and Norway on one hand and Iceland and Greenland on the other) (Payne et al, 2022). In short, recent reduction of stocks of blue whiting due to overfishing left the pelagic trawler fleets of the Faroe Islands and Iceland looking for a new target species.…”

“…The occurrence of conflicts shifted geographically from North America and Europe to Asia, with more severe confrontations in territorial disputes, and higher involvement of illegal, unreported, or unregulated fisheries over time. This highlights the need to foresee distributional changes for commercial species to help avoid conflicts around transboundary stocks and to adapt marine fisheries to climate variations (Pinsky et al, 2018;Payne et al, 2022).…”

“…Such modelling is increasingly using multi-model averaging and ensembles to help quantify uncertainty, increase reliability and predictive power, and to improve utility for scientific and applied purposes. For example, a combination of marine climate predictions with an ecological niche model (ENM) and an ensemble approach were employed to generate skilful decadal-scale forecasts for the habitat and distribution of three marine fish (bluefin tuna, blue whiting, and mackerel) in the northern North Atlantic (Payne et al, 2022), one of the most predictable regions on the decadal scale (Frölicher et al, 2020). Reported forecast skills were significantly better than climatological reference forecasts for the lead times of 3-10 years, highlighting the suitability of similar tools for planning and climate adaptation in the ocean dependent regions, such as small island developing states (SIDS) and the global south, if environmental habitat drivers have adequate prediction skill.…”

“…On one hand, advances in global dynamic climate prediction now allow skilful predictions of the ocean state and the drivers of shifts in distribution of marine species for a decade ahead (Tommasi et al, 2017a;Payne et al, 2022). On the other hand, the usability of these predictions for the benefit of stakeholders and ocean-dependent communities and businesses has yet to be improved (Payne et al, 2022).…”