Forecasting weather has become commonplace, but as society faces novel and uncertain environmental conditions there is a critical need to forecast ecology. Forewarning of ecosystem conditions during climate extremes can support proactive decision-making, yet applications of ecological forecasts are still limited. We showcase the capacity for existing marine management tools to transition to a forecasting configuration and provide skilful ecological forecasts up to 12 months in advance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe California Current Trophic Database (CCTD) was developed at NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in collaboration with numerous diet data contributors. We compiled the CCTD from twenty-four data sets, representing both systematic collections and directed trophic studies. Diet composition data, including stomach and scat samples, were obtained from 105,694 individual predators among 143 taxa collected throughout the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) from 1967-2019.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForage fishes are key energy conduits that transfer primary and secondary productivity to higher trophic levels. As novel environmental conditions caused by climate change alter ecosystems and predator-prey dynamics, there is a critical need to understand how forage fish control bottom-up forcing of food web dynamics. In the northeast Pacific, northern anchovy () is an important forage species with high interannual variability in population size that subsequently impacts the foraging and reproductive ecology of marine predators.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhale entanglements with fishing gear, exacerbated by changing environmental conditions, pose significant risk to whale populations. Management tools used to reduce entanglement risk, for example temporary area restrictions on fishing, can have negative economic consequences for fishing communities. Balancing whale protection with sustaining productive fisheries is therefore a challenge experienced worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFluctuations in prey abundance, composition, and distribution can impact predators, and when predators and fisheries target the same species, predators become essential to ecosystem-based management. Because of the difficulty in collecting concomitant predator-prey data at appropriate scales in patchy environments, few studies have identified strong linkages between cetaceans and prey, especially across large geographic areas. During summer 2018, a line-transect survey for cetaceans and coastal pelagic species was conducted over the continental shelf and slope of British Columbia, Canada, and the US West Coast, allowing for a large-scale investigation of predator-prey spatial relationships.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented cancellations of fisheries and ecosystem-assessment surveys, resulting in a recession of observations needed for management and conservation globally. This unavoidable reduction of survey data poses challenges for informing biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, developing future stock assessments of harvested species, and providing strategic advice for ecosystem-based management. We present a diversified framework involving integration of monitoring data with empirical models and simulations to inform ecosystem status within the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRockfish are an important component of West Coast fisheries and California Current food webs, and recruitment (cohort strength) for rockfish populations has long been characterized as highly variable for most studied populations. Research efforts and fisheries surveys have long sought to provide greater insights on both the environmental drivers, and the fisheries and ecosystem consequences, of this variability. Here, variability in the temporal and spatial abundance and distribution patterns of young-of-the-year (YOY) rockfishes are described based on midwater trawl surveys conducted throughout the coastal waters of California Current between 2001 and 2019.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEstimating when and where survival bottlenecks occur in free-ranging marine predators is critical for effective demographic monitoring and spatial planning. This is particularly relevant to juvenile stages of long-lived species for which direct observations of death are typically not possible. We used satellite telemetry data from fledgling Adélie, chinstrap and gentoo penguins near the Antarctic Peninsula to estimate the spatio-temporal scale of a bottleneck after fledging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the California Current Ecosystem, krill represent a key link between primary production and higher trophic level species owing to their central position in the food web and tendency to form dense aggregations. However, the strongly advective circulation associated with coastal upwelling may decouple the timing, occurrence, and persistence of krill hotspots from phytoplankton biomass and nutrient sources. Results from a coupled physical-biological model provide insights into fundamental mechanisms controlling the phenology of krill hotspots in the California Current Ecosystem, and their sensitivity to alongshore changes in coastal upwelling intensity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change and increased variability and intensity of climate events, in combination with recovering protected species populations and highly capitalized fisheries, are posing new challenges for fisheries management. We examine socio-ecological features of the unprecedented 2014-2016 northeast Pacific marine heatwave to understand the potential causes for record numbers of whale entanglements in the central California Current crab fishery. We observed habitat compression of coastal upwelling, changes in availability of forage species (krill and anchovy), and shoreward distribution shift of foraging whales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examines the occurrence of humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) song in the northeast Pacific from three years of continuous recordings off central California (36.713°N, 122.186°W).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubmarine canyon systems are ubiquitous features of marine ecosystems, known to support high levels of biodiversity. Canyons may be important to benthic-pelagic ecosystem coupling, but their role in concentrating plankton and structuring pelagic communities is not well known. We hypothesize that at the scale of a large marine ecosystem, canyons provide a critical habitat network, which maintain energy flow and trophic interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman impacts (e.g., fishing, pollution, and shipping) on pelagic ecosystems are increasing, causing concerns about stresses on marine food webs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTiming of spring sea-ice retreat shapes the southeast Bering Sea food web. We compared summer seabird densities and average bathymetry depth distributions between years with early (typically warm) and late (typically cold) ice retreat. Averaged over all seabird species, densities in early-ice-retreat-years were 10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the past century, commercial fisheries have expanded from small vessels fishing in shallow, coastal habitats to a broad suite of vessels and gears that fish virtually every marine habitat on the globe. Understanding how fisheries have developed in space and time is critical for interpreting and managing the response of ecosystems to the effects of fishing, however time series of spatially explicit data are typically rare. Recently, the 1933-1968 portion of the commercial catch dataset from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife was recovered and digitized, completing the full historical series for both commercial and recreational datasets from 1933-2010.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies of predator–prey demographic responses and the physical drivers of such relationships are rare, yet essential for predicting future changes in the structure and dynamics of marine ecosystems. Here, we hypothesize that predator–prey relationships vary spatially in association with underlying physical ocean conditions, leading to observable changes in demographic rates, such as reproduction. To test this hypothesis, we quantified spatio-temporal variability in hydrographic conditions, krill, and forage fish to model predator (seabird) demographic responses over 18 years (1990–2007).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: CT Pulmonary Angiography has been shown to be equivalent to Ventilation/ Perfusion scanning in 3-month outcome studies, but it detects more pulmonary emboli. Isolated subsegmental pulmonary emboli are thought to account for some of the increase in diagnosis, but it is not known whether these emboli represent a harbinger for future thromboembolic events. The objective of this study was to determine the 3-month clinical outcomes of a cohort of patients diagnosed with isolated subsegmental pulmonary emboli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe paper is submitted as one of the recommendations for diagnostic and therapeutic care in nuclear medicine meant in particular for the clinical need of physicians indication treatment of thyroid carcinoma with iodide. The author presents a brief review of principles, indications, the procedure proper, clinical interpretation and possible risks and contraindications, incl. the clinical and socioeconomic impact.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe paper is presented as one of recommendations of diagnostic and therapeutic care in the field of nuclear medicine intended especially for the clinical needs of physicians indicating palliative treatment of metastases into bones using radiopharmaceuticals. It provides a brief review of principles, indications, the very performance of interventions, clinical interpretations, possible risks and contraindications including the clinical and social-economic meaning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMice were fed pure trans11 octadecenoic acid (trans-vaccenic acid; TVA) to determine whether it is desaturated to cis9, trans11 octadecadienoic acid, a predominant isomer of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). In a preliminary trial, 12% of the TVA consumed during a 2-wk feeding period was recovered in the carcass as CLA. As a proportion of TVA in the tissues available for bioconversion, 48.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMedication cart filling with an automated dispensing system was compared with manual cart filling with respect to personnel time, costs, and accuracy. At a 650-bed tertiary-care medical center, technician cart filling and pharmacist cart checking were timed for the existing manual system and for the Baxter ATC-212 automated dispensing system. Subsequently, carts filled with each system were checked for accuracy of dispensing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGranulocytopenia is a complication of human immunodeficiency virus disease, as well as a toxic manifestation of zidovudine therapy. To evaluate pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic relationships, 11 AIDS-AIDS-related complex patients who had developed zidovudine-associated granulocytopenia (mean absolute neutrophil count, 1,077/mm3) were examined after addition of granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) to zidovudine. GM-CSF was administered as a daily (1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF