Species redistribution creates unequal outcomes for multispecies fisheries under projected climate change

Abstract

Climate change drives species distribution shifts, impacting the availability of resources people rely upon for food and livelihoods. These impacts are complex, manifest at local scales and have diverse effects across multiple species. Yet, for wild capture fisheries current understanding is dominated by predictions for individual species at coarse spatial scales. We show that localized environmental changes that vary across species will alter the ensemble of co-occurring fishery species within established fishing footprints along the U.S. West Coast. We demonstrate that availability of the most economically-valuable, primary target species is highly likely to decline coastwide in response to warming and reduced oxygen concentrations, while availability of the most abundant, secondary target species will potentially increase. A spatial reshuffling of primary and secondary target species suggests regionally heterogeneous opportunities for fishers to adapt by changing where or what they fish. Developing foresight into the collective responses of species at local scales will enable more effective and tangible adaptation pathways for fishing communities.

‘Drivin' with your eyes closed’: Results from an international, blinded simulation experiment to evaluate spatial stock assessments

“…Thus, we encourage RFMOs to pursue funding to support continuation of similar simulation experiments in the future, while working across institutional boundaries to improve and develop next‐generation assessment platforms. The spatial complexities that must be confronted by fisheries assessment and management will increase as living marine resources redistribute in warming oceans, thereby, crossing regional and jurisdictional boundaries (Liu et al., 2023). Similarly, expansion of the blue economy will further complicate partitioning of the marine environment among competing sectors.…”

Dutch landscapes have lost insect‐pollinated plants over the past 87 years

“…The final model formula: The proportion of plant species pollinated by each mode ~ Time period + (1|plot ID) + spatial structure. These analyses were conducted in R version 4.0.3 (R Core Team, 2020) using the sdmTMB package (version 0.4.1; Anderson et al., 2022), which has been used in many ecological studies to account for spatial autocorrelation (Barbato et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Ohyama et al., 2023).…”

Stay or go? Geographic variation in risks due to climate change for fishing fleets that adapt in-place or adapt on-the-move

“…populations along the U.S. West Coast are highly vulnerable to climate impacts at multiple life history stages [82]. An extension of this work could connect species distributions projected using dynamically downscaled ESM outputs (e.g., [83,84]) to fishing footprints directly, using expected changes in the resources themselves within customary use areas to derive estimates of exposure. Such an approach could capture the potential for more equatorward species moving into footprints while others move out [85][86][87]; but see [88]), and would also need to address the potential for fleets to capitalize on these changes under existing regulations.…”