High resolution assessment of commercial fisheries activity along the US West Coast using Vessel Monitoring System data with a case study using California groundfish fisheries.

Commercial fisheries along the US West Coast are important components of local and regional economies. They use various fishing gear, target a high diversity of species, and are highly spatially heterogeneous, making it challenging to generate a synoptic picture of fisheries activity in the region. Still, understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of US West Coast fisheries is critical to meet the US legal mandate to manage fisheries sustainably and to better coordinate activities among a growing number of users of ocean space, including offshore renewable energy, aquaculture, shipping, and interactions with habitats and key non-fishery species such as seabirds and marine mammals.

Selection of planning unit size in dynamic management strategies to reduce human-wildlife conflict.

Conservation planning traditionally relies upon static reserves; however, there is increasing emphasis on dynamic management (DM) strategies that are flexible in space and time. Due to its novelty, DM lacks best practices to guide design and implementation. We assessed the effect of planning unit size in a DM tool designed to reduce entanglement of protected whales in vertical ropes of surface buoys attached to crab traps in the lucrative U.

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

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.

Equivocal associations between small-scale shoreline restoration and subtidal fishes in an urban estuary.

Restoration of degraded coastal and estuarine habitats owing to human activities is a major global concern. In Puget Sound, Washington, U.S.

Recommendations for quantifying and reducing uncertainty in climate projections of species distributions.

Projecting the future distributions of commercially and ecologically important species has become a critical approach for ecosystem managers to strategically anticipate change, but large uncertainties in projections limit climate adaptation planning. Although distribution projections are primarily used to understand the scope of potential change-rather than accurately predict specific outcomes-it is nonetheless essential to understand where and why projections can give implausible results and to identify which processes contribute to uncertainty. Here, we use a series of simulated species distributions, an ensemble of 252 species distribution models, and an ensemble of three regional ocean climate projections, to isolate the influences of uncertainty from earth system model spread and from ecological modeling.

Social-ecological vulnerability of fishing communities to climate change: A U.S. West Coast case study.

Climate change is already impacting coastal communities, and ongoing and future shifts in fisheries species productivity from climate change have implications for the livelihoods and cultures of coastal communities. Harvested marine species in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem support U.S.

Avoiding critical thresholds through effective monitoring.

A major challenge in sustainability science is identifying targets that maximize ecosystem benefits to humanity while minimizing the risk of crossing critical system thresholds. One critical threshold is the biomass at which populations become so depleted that their population growth rates become negative-depensation. Here, we evaluate how the value of monitoring information increases as a natural resource spends more time near the critical threshold.

The weaker sex: Male lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus) with blue color polymorphism are more burdened by parasites than are other sex-color combinations.

The unusual blue color polymorphism of lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus) is the subject of much speculation but little empirical research; ~20% of lingcod individuals exhibit this striking blue color morph, which is discrete from and found within the same populations as the more common brown morph. In other species, color polymorphisms are intimately linked with host-parasite interactions, which led us to ask whether blue coloration in lingcod might be associated with parasitism, either as cause or effect. To test how color and parasitism are related in this host species, we performed parasitological dissection of 89 lingcod individuals collected across more than 26 degrees of latitude from Alaska, Washington, and California, USA.

Marine heatwave challenges solutions to human-wildlife conflict.

Despite the increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme climate events, little is known about how their impacts flow through social and ecological systems or whether management actions can dampen deleterious effects. We examined how the record 2014-2016 Northeast Pacific marine heatwave influenced trade-offs in managing conflict between conservation goals and human activities using a case study on large whale entanglements in the U.S.

Synchrony erodes spatial portfolios of an anadromous fish and alters availability for resource users.

Environmental forces can create spatially synchronous dynamics among nearby populations. However, increased climate variability, driven by anthropogenic climate change, will likely enhance synchrony among spatially disparate populations. Population synchrony may lead to greater fluctuations in abundance, but the consequences of population synchrony across multiple scales of biological organization, including impacts to putative competitors, dependent predators or human communities, are rarely considered in this context.

Climate shock effects and mediation in fisheries.

Climate shocks can reorganize the social-ecological linkages in food-producing communities, leading to a sudden loss of key products in food systems. The extent and persistence of this reorganization are difficult to observe and summarize, but are critical aspects of predicting and rapidly assessing community vulnerability to extreme events. We apply network analysis to evaluate the impact of a climate shock-an unprecedented marine heatwave-on patterns of resource use in California fishing communities, which were severely affected through closures of the Dungeness crab fishery.

Strong population differentiation in lingcod () is driven by a small portion of the genome.

Delimiting intraspecific genetic variation in harvested species is crucial to the assessment of population status for natural resource management and conservation purposes. Here, we evaluated genetic population structure in lingcod (), a commercially and recreationally important fishery species along the west coast of North America. We used 16,749 restriction site-associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) markers, in 611 individuals collected from across the bulk of the species range from Southeast Alaska to Baja California, Mexico.

Caribbean reefs of the Anthropocene: Variance in ecosystem metrics indicates bright spots on coral depauperate reefs.

Dramatic coral loss has significantly altered many Caribbean reefs, with potentially important consequences for the ecological functions and ecosystem services provided by reef systems. Many studies examine coral loss and its causes-and often presume a universal decline of ecosystem services with coral loss-rather than evaluating the range of possible outcomes for a diversity of ecosystem functions and services at reefs varying in coral cover. We evaluate 10 key ecosystem metrics, relating to a variety of different reef ecosystem functions and services, on 328 Caribbean reefs varying in coral cover.

It's a wormy world: Meta-analysis reveals several decades of change in the global abundance of the parasitic nematodes Anisakis spp. and Pseudoterranova spp. in marine fishes and invertebrates.

The Anthropocene has brought substantial change to ocean ecosystems, but whether this age will bring more or less marine disease is unknown. In recent years, the accelerating tempo of epizootic and zoonotic disease events has made it seem as if disease is on the rise. Is this apparent increase in disease due to increased observation and sampling effort, or to an actual rise in the abundance of parasites and pathogens? We examined the literature to track long-term change in the abundance of two parasitic nematode genera with zoonotic potential: Anisakis spp.

Spatial variation in exploited metapopulations obscures risk of collapse.

Unanticipated declines among exploited species have commonly occurred despite harvests that appeared sustainable prior to collapse. This is particularly true in the oceans where spatial scales of management are often mismatched with spatially complex metapopulations. We explore causes, consequences, and potential solutions for spatial mismatches in harvested metapopulations in three ways.

Ocean recoveries for tomorrow's Earth: Hitting a moving target.

Growing scientific awareness, strong regulations, and effective management have begun to fulfill the promise of recovery in the ocean. However, many efforts toward ocean recovery remain unsuccessful, in part because marine ecosystems and the human societies that depend upon them are constantly changing. Furthermore, recovery efforts are embedded in marine social-ecological systems where large-scale dynamics can inhibit recovery.

Are California Elementary School Test Scores More Strongly Associated With Urban Trees Than Poverty?

Unprecedented rates of urbanization are changing our understanding of the ways in which children build connections to the natural world, including the importance of educational settings in affecting this relationship. In addition to influencing human-nature connection, greenspace around school grounds has been associated with benefits to students' cognitive function. Questions remain regarding the size of this benefit relative to other factors, and which features of greenspace are responsible for these effects.

From the predictable to the unexpected: kelp forest and benthic invertebrate community dynamics following decades of sea otter expansion.

The recovery of predators has the potential to restore ecosystems and fundamentally alter the services they provide. One iconic example of this is keystone predation by sea otters in the Northeast Pacific. Here, we combine spatial time series of sea otter abundance, canopy kelp area, and benthic invertebrate abundance from Washington State, USA, to examine the shifting consequences of sea otter reintroduction for kelp and kelp forest communities.

Conserving connectivity: Human influence on subsidy transfer and relevant restoration efforts.

Conservation efforts tend to focus on the direct impacts humans have on their surrounding environment; however there are also many ways in which people indirectly affect ecosystems. Recent research on ecological subsidies-the transfer of energy and nutrients from one ecosystem to another-has highlighted the importance of nutrient exchange for maintaining productivity and diversity at a landscape scale, while also pointing toward the fragility of ecotones and vulnerability of subsidies to human activities. We review the recent literature on landscape connectivity and ecosystem subsidies from aquatic systems to terrestrial systems.

Rapid and direct recoveries of predators and prey through synchronized ecosystem management.

One of the twenty-first century's greatest environmental challenges is to recover and restore species, habitats and ecosystems. The decision about how to initiate restoration is best-informed by an understanding of the linkages between ecosystem components and, given these linkages, an appreciation of the consequences of choosing to recover one ecosystem component before another. However, it remains difficult to predict how the sequence of species' recoveries within food webs influences the speed and trajectory of restoration, and what that means for human well-being.

Spatial distribution of environmental DNA in a nearshore marine habitat.

In the face of increasing threats to biodiversity, the advancement of methods for surveying biological communities is a major priority for ecologists. Recent advances in molecular biological technologies have made it possible to detect and sequence DNA from environmental samples (environmental DNA or eDNA); however, eDNA techniques have not yet seen widespread adoption as a routine method for biological surveillance primarily due to gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of eDNA in space and time. In order to identify the effective spatial scale of this approach in a dynamic marine environment, we collected marine surface water samples from transects ranging from the intertidal zone to four kilometers from shore.

A framework for inferring biological communities from environmental DNA.

Environmental DNA (eDNA), genetic material recovered from an environmental medium such as soil, water, or feces, reflects the membership of the ecological community present in the sampled environment. As such, eDNA is a potentially rich source of data for basic ecology, conservation, and management, because it offers the prospect of quantitatively reconstructing whole ecological communities from easily obtained samples. However, like all sampling methods, eDNA sequencing is subject to methodological limitations that can generate biased descriptions of ecological communities.

Genetic signatures of ecological diversity along an urbanization gradient.

Despite decades of work in environmental science and ecology, estimating human influences on ecosystems remains challenging. This is partly due to complex chains of causation among ecosystem elements, exacerbated by the difficulty of collecting biological data at sufficient spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. Here, we demonstrate the utility of environmental DNA (eDNA) for quantifying associations between human land use and changes in an adjacent ecosystem.