Climate change considerations are fundamental to management of deep-sea resource extraction.

Climate change manifestation in the ocean, through warming, oxygen loss, increasing acidification, and changing particulate organic carbon flux (one metric of altered food supply), is projected to affect most deep-ocean ecosystems concomitantly with increasing direct human disturbance. Climate drivers will alter deep-sea biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, and may interact with disturbance from resource extraction activities or even climate geoengineering. We suggest that to ensure the effective management of increasing use of the deep ocean (e.

Hydrothermal vent fields discovered in the southern Gulf of California clarify role of habitat in augmenting regional diversity.

Hydrothermal vent communities are distributed along mid-ocean spreading ridges as isolated patches. While distance is a key factor influencing connectivity among sites, habitat characteristics are also critical. The Pescadero Basin (PB) and Alarcón Rise (AR) vent fields, recently discovered in the southern Gulf of California, are bounded by previously known vent localities (e.