Abstract
Climate change effects on marine ecosystems include impacts on primary production, ocean temperature, species distributions, and abundance at local to global scales. These changes will significantly alter marine ecosystem structure and function with associated socio-economic impacts on ecosystem services, marine fisheries, and fishery-dependent societies. Yet how these changes may play out among ocean basins over the 21st century remains unclear, with most projections coming from single ecosystem models that do not adequately capture the range of model uncertainty. We address this by using six marine ecosystem models within the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (Fish-MIP) to analyze responses of marine animal biomass in all major ocean basins to contrasting climate change scenarios. Under a high emissions scenario (RCP8.5), total marine animal biomass declined by an ensemble mean of 15%–30% (±12%–17%) in the North and South Atlantic and Pacific, and the Indian Ocean by 2100, whereas polar ocean basins experienced a 20%–80% (±35%–200%) increase. Uncertainty and model disagreement were greatest in the Arctic and smallest in the South Pacific Ocean. Projected changes were reduced under a low (RCP2.6) emissions scenario. Under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5, biomass projections were highly correlated with changes in net primary production and negatively correlated with projected sea surface temperature increases across all ocean basins except the polar oceans. Ecosystem structure was projected to shift as animal biomass concentrated in different size-classes across ocean basins and emissions scenarios. We highlight that climate change mitigation measures could moderate the impacts on marine animal biomass by reducing biomass declines in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean basins. The range of individual model projections emphasizes the importance of using an ensemble approach in assessing uncertainty of future change.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 459-472 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Global Change Biology |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Feb 1 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge the immense effort of all marine ecosystem modelers who contributed their expertise, time, and feedback to this study and the Fish-MIP initiative, particularly T. Silva, D. Carozza, D. Bianchi, T. Eddy, N. Barrier, P. Verley, V. Christensen, and J. Steenbeek for running Fish-MIP simulations and providing ecosystem model outputs. We also thank L. Bopp, J. Dunne, C. Stock, and T. Roy for providing ESM outputs; M. B?chner, J. Volkholz, and J. Schewe for technical support; and D. Boyce for valuable discussions and comments. Financial support was provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, grant no. 01LS1201A1) and through the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP). ABB acknowledges financial support from the NSERC CREATE Transatlantic Ocean Science and Technology Program (TOSST), HKL from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, and DPT from the Kann Rasmussen Foundation, Denmark.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- Global and Planetary Change
- Environmental Chemistry
- Ecology
- General Environmental Science
