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

The ability to anticipate marine habitat shifts responding to climate variability has high scientific and socioeconomic value. Here we quantify interannual-to-decadal predictability of habitat shifts by combining trait-based aerobic habitat constraints with a suite of initialized retrospective Earth System Model forecasts, for diverse marine ecotypes in the North American Large Marine Ecosystems. We find that aerobic habitat viability, defined by joint constraints of temperature and oxygen on organismal energy balance, is potentially predictable in the upper-600 m ocean, showing a substantial improvement over a simple persistence forecast.

Potential impacts of climate change on agriculture and fisheries production in 72 tropical coastal communities.

Climate change is expected to profoundly affect key food production sectors, including fisheries and agriculture. However, the potential impacts of climate change on these sectors are rarely considered jointly, especially below national scales, which can mask substantial variability in how communities will be affected. Here, we combine socioeconomic surveys of 3,008 households and intersectoral multi-model simulation outputs to conduct a sub-national analysis of the potential impacts of climate change on fisheries and agriculture in 72 coastal communities across five Indo-Pacific countries (Indonesia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, and Tanzania).

Next-generation ensemble projections reveal higher climate risks for marine ecosystems.

Projections of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems have revealed long-term declines in global marine animal biomass and unevenly distributed impacts on fisheries. Here we apply an enhanced suite of global marine ecosystem models from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (Fish-MIP), forced by new-generation Earth system model outputs from Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), to provide insights into how projected climate change will affect future ocean ecosystems. Compared with the previous generation CMIP5-forced Fish-MIP ensemble, the new ensemble ecosystem simulations show a greater decline in mean global ocean animal biomass under both strong-mitigation and high-emissions scenarios due to elevated warming, despite greater uncertainty in net primary production in the high-emissions scenario.

Energy Flow Through Marine Ecosystems: Confronting Transfer Efficiency.

Transfer efficiency is the proportion of energy passed between nodes in food webs. It is an emergent, unitless property that is difficult to measure, and responds dynamically to environmental and ecosystem changes. Because the consequences of changes in transfer efficiency compound through ecosystems, slight variations can have large effects on food availability for top predators.