Cumulative human impacts on global marine fauna highlight risk to biological and functional diversity.

Anthropogenic stressors to marine ecosystems from climate change and human activities increase extinction risk of species, disrupt ecosystem integrity, and threaten important ecosystem services. Addressing these stressors requires understanding where and to what extent they are impacting marine biological and functional diversity. We model cumulative risk of human impact upon 21,159 marine animal species by combining information on species-level vulnerability and spatial exposure to a range of anthropogenic stressors.

Spatial and life history variation in a trait-based species vulnerability and impact model.

Anthropogenic pressures threaten biodiversity, necessitating conservation actions founded on robust ecological models. However, prevailing models inadequately capture the spatiotemporal variation in environmental pressures faced by species with high mobility or complex life histories, as data are often aggregated across species' life histories or spatial distributions. We highlight the limitations of static models for dynamic species and incorporate life history variation and spatial distributions for species and stressors into a trait-based vulnerability and impact model.

At-risk marine biodiversity faces extensive, expanding, and intensifying human impacts.

Human activities and climate change threaten marine biodiversity worldwide, though sensitivity to these stressors varies considerably by species and taxonomic group. Mapping the spatial distribution of 14 anthropogenic stressors from 2003 to 2013 onto the ranges of 1271 at-risk marine species sensitive to them, we found that, on average, species faced potential impacts across 57% of their ranges, that this footprint expanded over time, and that the impacts intensified across 37% of their ranges. Although fishing activity dominated the footprint of impacts in national waters, climate stressors drove the expansion and intensification of impacts.

Changes in ocean health in British Columbia from 2001 to 2016.

Effective management of marine systems requires quantitative tools that can assess the state of the marine social-ecological system and are responsive to management actions and pressures. We applied the Ocean Health Index (OHI) framework to retrospectively assess ocean health in British Columbia annually from 2001 to 2016 for eight goals that represent the values of British Columbia's coastal communities. We found overall ocean health improved over the study period, from 75 (out of 100) in 2001 to 83 in 2016, with scores for inhabited regions ranging from 68 (North Coast, 2002) to 87 (West Vancouver Island, 2011).

Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools.

Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve-we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same-so we can all produce better science in less time.

Aligning marine species range data to better serve science and conservation.

Species distribution data provide the foundation for a wide range of ecological research studies and conservation management decisions. Two major efforts to provide marine species distributions at a global scale are the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which provides expert-generated range maps that outline the complete extent of a species' distribution; and AquaMaps, which provides model-generated species distribution maps that predict areas occupied by the species. Together these databases represent 24,586 species (93.