Research has the potential to simultaneously generate new knowledge and contribute meaningful social-ecological benefits; however, research processes and outcomes can also perpetuate extractive patterns that have manifested the climate, biodiversity, and social justice crises. One approach to enhance the societal value of research processes is to strengthen relationships with places of study and the peoples of those places. Deepening relational engagement with the social-ecological context and history of a place can lead to more accurate results and improved public trust in the scientific process and is particularly important for natural scientists who work at the interface of nature and society.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNatural resources often exhibit large interannual fluctuations in productivity driven by shifting environmental conditions, and this translates to high variability in the revenue resource users earn. However, users can dampen this variability by harvesting a portfolio of resources. In the context of fisheries, this means targeting multiple populations, though the ability to actually build diverse fishing portfolios is often constrained by the costs and availability of fishing permits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSzuwalski argues that varying age structure can affect surplus production and that recruitment is a better metric of productivity. We explain how our null model controlled for age structure and other processes as explanations for the temperature-production relationship. Surplus production includes growth, recruitment, and other processes and provides a more complete description of food production impacts than does recruitment alone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is altering habitats for marine fishes and invertebrates, but the net effect of these changes on potential food production is unknown. We used temperature-dependent population models to measure the influence of warming on the productivity of 235 populations of 124 species in 38 ecoregions. Some populations responded significantly positively ( = 9 populations) and others responded significantly negatively ( = 19 populations) to warming, with the direction and magnitude of the response explained by ecoregion, taxonomy, life history, and exploitation history.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQuantifying the impacts of disturbances such as oil spills on marine species can be challenging. Natural environmental variability, human responses to the disturbance (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Accounting for carbon gains and losses in young-growth forests is a key part of carbon assessments. A common silvicultural practice in young forests is thinning to increase the growth rate of residual trees. However, the effect of thinning on total stand carbon stock in these stands is uncertain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForage fish support the largest fisheries in the world but also play key roles in marine food webs by transferring energy from plankton to upper trophic-level predators, such as large fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Fishing can, thereby, have far reaching consequences on marine food webs unless safeguards are in place to avoid depleting forage fish to dangerously low levels, where dependent predators are most vulnerable. However, disentangling the contributions of fishing vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe potential of predation to structure marine food webs is widely acknowledged. However, available tools to detect the regulation of prey population dynamics by predation are limited, partly because available population data often aggregate a population's age structure into a single biomass or abundance metric. Additionally, many food webs are relatively complex, with prey species subject to different assemblages of predators throughout their ontogeny.
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