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.

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.

The role of continental shelf bathymetry in shaping marine range shifts in the face of climate change.

As a consequence of anthropogenic climate change, marine species on continental shelves around the world are rapidly shifting deeper and poleward. However, whether these shifts deeper and poleward will allow species to access more, less, or equivalent amounts of continental shelf area and associated critical habitats remains unclear. By examining the proportion of seabed area at a range of depths for each large marine ecosystem (LME), we found that shelf area declined monotonically for 19% of LMEs examined.

Range edges of North American marine species are tracking temperature over decades.

Understanding the dynamics of species range edges in the modern era is key to addressing fundamental biogeographic questions about abiotic and biotic drivers of species distributions. Range edges are where colonization and extirpation processes unfold, and so these dynamics are also important to understand for effective natural resource management and conservation. However, few studies to date have analyzed time series of range edge positions in the context of climate change, in part because range edges are difficult to detect.

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.

Cold range edges of marine fishes track climate change better than warm edges.

Species around the world are shifting their ranges in response to climate change. To make robust predictions about climate-related colonizations and extinctions, it is vital to understand the dynamics of range edges. This study is among the first to examine annual dynamics of cold and warm range edges, as most global change studies average observational data over space or over time.

Changes in higher trophic level productivity, diversity and niche space in a rapidly warming continental shelf ecosystem.

There is long-standing ecological and socioeconomic interest in what controls the diversity and productivity of ecosystems. That focus has intensified with shifting environmental conditions associated with accelerating climate change. The U.

Climate-Driven Shifts in Marine Species Ranges: Scaling from Organisms to Communities.

The geographic distributions of marine species are changing rapidly, with leading range edges following climate poleward, deeper, and in other directions and trailing range edges often contracting in similar directions. These shifts have their roots in fine-scale interactions between organisms and their environment-including mosaics and gradients of temperature and oxygen-mediated by physiology, behavior, evolution, dispersal, and species interactions. These shifts reassemble food webs and can have dramatic consequences.

Opportunities for behavioral rescue under rapid environmental change.

Laboratory measurements of physiological and demographic tolerances are important in understanding the impact of climate change on species diversity; however, it has been recognized that forecasts based solely on these laboratory estimates overestimate risk by omitting the capacity for species to utilize microclimatic variation via behavioral adjustments in activity patterns or habitat choice. The complex, and often context-dependent nature, of microclimate utilization has been an impediment to the advancement of general predictive models. Here, we overcome this impediment and estimate the potential impact of warming on the fitness of ectotherms using a benefit/cost trade-off derived from the simple and broadly documented thermal performance curve and a generalized cost function.

Correction: Eco-Label Conveys Reliable Information on Fish Stock Health to Seafood Consumers.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Projecting shifts in thermal habitat for 686 species on the North American continental shelf.

Recent shifts in the geographic distribution of marine species have been linked to shifts in preferred thermal habitats. These shifts in distribution have already posed challenges for living marine resource management, and there is a strong need for projections of how species might be impacted by future changes in ocean temperatures during the 21st century. We modeled thermal habitat for 686 marine species in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans using long-term ecological survey data from the North American continental shelves.

Diversity in thermal affinity among key piscivores buffers impacts of ocean warming on predator-prey interactions.

Asymmetries in responses to climate change have the potential to alter important predator-prey interactions, in part by altering the location and size of spatial refugia for prey. We evaluated the effect of ocean warming on interactions between four important piscivores and four of their prey in the U.S.

Gradual changes in range size accompany long-term trends in species richness.

Species richness has long been used as an indicator of ecosystem functioning and health. Global richness is declining, but it is unclear whether sub-global trends differ. Regional trends are especially understudied, with most focused on island regions where richness is strongly impacted by novel colonisations.

Protection of large predators in a marine reserve alters size-dependent prey mortality.

Where predator-prey interactions are size-dependent, reductions in predator size owing to fishing has the potential to disrupt the ecological role of top predators in marine ecosystems. In southern California kelp forests, we investigated the size-dependence of the interaction between herbivorous sea urchins and one of their predators, California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher). Empirical tests examined how differences in predator size structure between reserve and fished areas affected size-specific urchin mortality.

Eco-label conveys reliable information on fish stock health to seafood consumers.

Concerns over fishing impacts on marine populations and ecosystems have intensified the need to improve ocean management. One increasingly popular market-based instrument for ecological stewardship is the use of certification and eco-labeling programs to highlight sustainable fisheries with low environmental impacts. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the most prominent of these programs.

Do behavioral foraging responses of prey to predators function similarly in restored and pristine foodwebs?

Efforts to restore top predators in human-altered systems raise the question of whether rebounds in predator populations are sufficient to restore pristine foodweb dynamics. Ocean ecosystems provide an ideal system to test this question. Removal of fishing in marine reserves often reverses declines in predator densities and size.

Waterborne cues from crabs induce thicker skeletons, smaller gonads and size-specific changes in growth rate in sea urchins.

Indirect predator-induced effects on growth, morphology and reproduction have been extensively studied in marine invertebrates but usually without consideration of size-specific effects and not at all in post-metamorphic echinoids. Urchins are an unusually good system, in which, to study size effects because individuals of various ages within one species span four orders of magnitude in weight while retaining a nearly isometric morphology. We tracked growth of urchins, (0.