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

Abstract

Climate change drives species distribution shifts, affecting 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. However, for wild capture fisheries, current understanding is dominated by predictions for individual species at coarse spatial scales. We show that species-specific responses to localized environmental changes will alter the collection of co-occurring 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

“…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.…”

Skillful multiyear prediction of marine habitat shifts jointly constrained by ocean temperature and dissolved oxygen

“…The generated habitat forecast products can be fully employed for living marine resource management and decision making in response to the changing ocean conditions (e.g., ref. 33 ). For example, northward habitat contractions can make it infeasible to fish from certain ports, while southward habitat expansion opens ports that would need to be prepared for processing the landings.…”

“…Additionally, unequal spatial and vertical habitat shifts of species due to their different metabolic traits (e.g., temperature sensitivity) may lead to substantial changes in prey-predator dynamics and ecosystem structure (e.g., overlap of viable habitats of southern and northern silver hake with juveniles as prey and adults as predator, ref. 34 ), which may affect resource availability to the fishery and require adaption by stakeholders 33 .…”

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

“…Here, we have chosen to use the proportion of self-pollination as the denominator in the log-ratios. To enhance the accuracy of explanatory variable effects (Dormann et al, 2007;Kühn et al, 2006;Mielke et al, 2020), 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).…”