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Healthy ocean ecosystems are needed to sustain people and livelihoods and to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Using the ocean sustainably requires overcoming many formidable challenges: overfishing, climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution. Despite gloomy forecasts, there is reason for hope. New tools, practices, and partnerships are beginning to transform local fisheries, biodiversity conservation, and marine spatial planning. The challenge is to bring them to a global scale. We dissect recent successes using a complex adaptive-systems (CAS) framework, which acknowledges the interconnectedness of social and ecological systems. Understanding how policies and practices change the feedbacks in CASs by altering the behavior of different system components is critical for building robust, sustainable states with favorable emergent properties. Our review reveals that altering incentives—either economic or social norms, or both—can achieve positive outcomes. For example, introduction of well-designed rights-based or secure-access fisheries and ecosystem service accounting shifts economic incentives to align conservation and economic benefits. Modifying social norms can create conditions that incentivize a company, country, or individual to fish sustainably, curb illegal fishing, or create large marine reserves as steps to enhance reputation or self-image. In each example, the feedbacks between individual actors and emergent system properties were altered, triggering a transition from a vicious to a virtuous cycle. We suggest that evaluating conservation tools by their ability to align incentives of actors with broader goals of sustainability is an underused approach that can provide a pathway toward scaling sustainability successes. In short, getting incentives right matters.

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals emphasize the importance of evidence-based decision-making. This is a clarion call for Earth scientists to contribute directly to the health, prosperity and well-being of all people.

As we advance in the Anthropocene, human activities and our interactions with the natural world are increasingly complex. Policymakers and managers are challenged to consider these activities and their wide-ranging environmental, ecological, and social consequences based upon scientific advice that is itself increasingly complex and may change with new information. Good science can contribute directly to smart decision making, but all too often, scientific information is not communicated to decision makers effectively, is swamped in the deluge of conflicting information, or is simply ignored for political or other reasons. To contribute effectively, scientific information must be accessible, understandable, relevant, actionable, and credible. Successful integration of scientific insights into policy can be facilitated through trusted relationships and open lines of communication between scientists and policymakers, accurate reports of scientific findings in the media, and scientific summaries that incorporate diverse perspectives and disciplines. Here, we highlight four case studies that demonstrate challenges and successes at the science–policy interface and offer strategies for scientists to become more adept at connecting with policymakers and effecting positive change.

Sea star wasting disease (SSWD) first appeared in Oregon in April 2014, and by June had spread to most of the coast. Although delayed compared to areas to the north and south, SSWD was initially most intense in north and central Oregon and spread southward. Up to 90% of individuals showed signs of disease from June-August 2014. In rocky intertidal habitats, populations of the dominant sea star Pisaster ochraceus were rapidly depleted, with magnitudes of decline in density among sites ranging from -2x to -9x (59 to 84%) and of biomass from -2.6x to -15.8x (60 to 90%) by September 2014. The frequency of symptomatic individuals declined over winter and persisted at a low rate through the spring and summer 2015 (~5-15%, at most sites) and into fall 2015. Disease expression included six symptoms: initially with twisting arms, then deflation and/or lesions, lost arms, losing grip on substrate, and final disintegration. SSWD was disproportionally higher in orange individuals, and higher in tidepools. Although historically P. ochraceus recruitment has been low, from fall 2014 to spring 2015 an unprecedented surge of sea star recruitment occurred at all sites, ranging from ~7x to 300x greater than in 2014. The loss of adult and juvenile individuals in 2014 led to a dramatic decline in predation rate on mussels compared to the previous two decades. A proximate cause of wasting was likely the "Sea Star associated Densovirus" (SSaDV), but the ultimate factors triggering the epidemic, if any, remain unclear. Although warm temperature has been proposed as a possible trigger, SSWD in Oregon populations increased with cool temperatures. Since P. ochraceus is a keystone predator that can strongly influence the biodiversity and community structure of the intertidal community, major community-level responses to the disease are expected. However, predicting the specific impacts and time course of change across west coast meta-communities is difficult, suggesting the need for detailed coast-wide investigation of the effects of this outbreak.

With the ongoing crisis of biodiversity loss and limited resources for conservation, the concept of biodiversity hotspots has been useful in determining conservation priority areas. However, there has been limited research into how temporal variability in biodiversity may influence conservation area prioritization. To address this information gap, we present an approach to evaluate the temporal consistency of biodiversity hotspots in large marine ecosystems. Using a large scale, public monitoring dataset collected over an eight year period off the US Pacific Coast, we developed a methodological approach for avoiding biases associated with hotspot delineation. We aggregated benthic fish species data from research trawls and calculated mean hotspot thresholds for fish species richness and Shannon’s diversity indices over the eight year dataset. We used a spatial frequency distribution method to assign hotspot designations to the grid cells annually. We found no areas containing consistently high biodiversity through the entire study period based on the mean thresholds, and no grid cell was designated as a hotspot for greater than 50% of the time-series. To test if our approach was sensitive to sampling effort and the geographic extent of the survey, we followed a similar routine for the northern region of the survey area. Our finding of low consistency in benthic fish biodiversity hotspots over time was upheld, regardless of biodiversity metric used, whether thresholds were calculated per year or across all years, or the spatial extent for which we calculated thresholds and identified hotspots. Our results suggest that static measures of benthic fish biodiversity off the US West Coast are insufficient for identification of hotspots and that long-term data are required to appropriately identify patterns of high temporal variability in biodiversity for these highly mobile taxa. Given that ecological communities are responding to a changing climate and other environmental perturbations, our work highlights the need for scientists and conservation managers to consider both spatial and temporal dynamics when designating biodiversity hotspots.

Author(s): Hughes, Brent B; Beas-Luna, Rodrigo; Barner, Allison K; Brewitt, Kimberly; Brumbaugh, Daniel R; Cerny-Chipman, Elizabeth B; Close, Sarah L; Coblentz, Kyle E; De Nesnera, Kristin L; Drobnitch, Sarah T; Figurski, Jared D; Focht, Becky; Friedman, Maya; Freiwald, Jan; Heady, Kristen K; Heady, Walter N; Hettinger, Annaliese; Johnson, Angela; Karr, Kendra A; Mahoney, Brenna; Moritsch, Monica M; Osterback, Ann-Marie K; Reimer, Jessica; Robinson, Jonathan; Rohrer, Tully; Rose, Jeremy M; Sabal, Megan; Segui, Leah M; Shen, Chenchen; Sullivan, Jenna; Zuercher, Rachel; Raimondi, Peter T; Menge, Bruce A; Grorud-Colvert, Kirsten; Novak, Mark; Carr, Mark H