Project: Coastal SEES (Track 2), Collaborative Research: Resilience and Adaptation of a Coastal Ecological-Economic System in Response to Increasing Temperature

NSF abstract:

Climate change is rapidly altering conditions in the ocean, and organisms exhibit complex responses to these changes. For many fish and invertebrates, changing temperatures are altering their characteristic spatial and seasonal distributions. Fisheries provide a two-way connection between changing ocean environments and local economies. As the distribution and abundance of species change, where, when, and how many fish are caught will change. Fisheries also respond to economic conditions or management policies, leading to feedbacks onto fish populations. In order to understand the impact of warming on fisheries ecosystems, it is essential to account for dynamical interactions between populations, fisheries, and markets. This project will develop an integrated view of the complex relationships between climate change, oceanography, ecology, and economics in a coastal marine setting. The Gulf of Maine, which includes economically valuable lobster and groundfish fisheries, provides an ideal test-bed to understand these dynamic linkages. Long-standing relationships between investigators and managers will ensure that research results are integrated into management processes to help sustain fisheries in the face of climate change. The project will train early-career scientists, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Through the Gulf of Maine Research Institute's LabVenture! program, the project will also develop a hands-on education module to teach Maine's 5th and 6th graders (~10,000 students/year) how computer models are used to understand complex interactions in the ocean.

The main goal of this project is to understand how changes in temperature propagate through fisheries, influencing the amount and value of the fish caught, and how fisheries respond to altered economic incentives, influencing the abundance of fish. The project will employ a multidisciplinary, multi-scale approach to test an array of oceanographic, ecological, and economic hypotheses, but the main outcome will be a dynamical model to explore the impacts of temperature trends and warm events on a linked ecological-fishery-economic system. The project will characterize spatial and temporal variability in surface and bottom temperatures in the Northwest Atlantic and Gulf of Maine, focusing on understanding the frequency and formation of large-magnitude events. The expected change in these events in the next century will be estimated using global climate model output for the region. Outputs from the temperature analysis will be used to understand how species distributions change in space and time due to warming and warm events. The impact of temperature changes on the population dynamics of lobsters and groundfish and the response of their markets to supply changes will be quantified. This information will be integrated into a model of lobster and groundfish populations, fisheries, and markets, which will be used to examine the impact of warming on the abundance of these target populations and on the economic performance of each fishery.

This project is supported under NSF's Coastal SEES (Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability) program.