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Climate change is causing species to shift their geographical distributions, with profound consequences for nature and people around the world. These climate-related species range shifts have created opportunities for some species to thrive, threatened others with extinction, and led to cascading effects through communities and ecosystems. While historical range shifts are often correlated with climate change, this relationship alone cannot always predict range shifts, forcing natural resource managers and conservation practitioners to act amidst high uncertainty about the future. I explored this uncertainty from management and ecological perspectives. First, I synthesized guidelines and evidence from global change, biogeography, and conservation planning literature to collate concrete recommendations for marine protected area design for range-shifting species. Next, I conducted some of the first analyses of species range edge dynamics over time, using long-term annual biodiversity monitoring efforts in U.S. oceans, which allowed for detection of fine-scale changes in range edge positions. I tested several biogeographical hypotheses about whether and how much cold and warm range edges will shift in response to changing temperatures. In the Northeast U.S., I reported that cold range edges shifted further and were more closely related to temperature than warm edges. I extended this analysis to several U.S. regions with different warming histories, where I quantified edges using a spatiotemporal model and then tested for thermal niche conservatism at range edges. I found notable regional differences, but thermal niche tracking was detected even in regions that did not warm during the study period. Species varied markedly in the degree to which they tracked temperature, even among related taxa in the same region. However, thermal niche conservatism occurred more frequently at cold range edges than at warm range edges. These patterns would not have emerged from methods using fewer time points, underscoring the need to use long time-series. This work tested biogeographical theories about the fundamental drivers of range edge dynamics, identified range edges of marine species that are expected to track climate change, and provided tools for managing range-shifting species.

Open science is a global movement happening across all research fields. It builds on years of efforts by individual researchers and a broad array of institutions, agencies, and grassroots organizations. Enabled by technology and the open web, the goal is to share knowledge and broaden participation in science, from team formation and early ideation to making intermediate and final research outputs openly accessible to all (“open access”). Because of its emphasis on transparency and collaboration, the open science movement dovetails with efforts to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in science and society. The Year of Open Science (2023), as declared by the US Biden-Harris Administration and many other US government agencies, is a great opportunity to boost participation in open science for the oceans. For researchers day-to-day, open science is a critical piece of modern workflows to analyze, collaborate, and communicate increasing amounts of data. Therefore, we focus this piece on open data science – the tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, inclusive practices for data-intensive research – and its intersection with the marine sciences. We discuss the state of various technical dimensions of open science – such as open-source programming and academic publishing – and argue that technical advancements in open science have outpaced our field’s culture change to adopt and incorporate them. We believe that increasing inclusivity and technical skill building are interlinked and must be prioritized within the marine science community to find collaborative solutions for mitigating and adapting to climate change and other threats to marine food sources, biodiversity, habitats, and society. As marine scientists whose careers have been profoundly influenced by and continue to benefit from open science, we provide examples of participation in this movement and the social transformation needed for the field of marine science to become truly “open”.

Scenarios are central to fisheries and aquatic conservation research on climate change. Scenarios project future greenhouse-gas emissions, which climate models translate into warming projections. Recent climate research and global development trends have significantly changed our understanding of plausible emissions pathways to 2100 and climate sensitivities to emissions. Here, we review these developments and make recommendations for scenario use in fisheries and aquatic conservation research. Although emissions pathways are uncertain, recent research suggests that scenarios producing ∼3.4–4.5 W/m2 radiative forcing by 2100 (e.g. scenarios SSP2-3.4 and SSP2-4.5/RCP4.5) might be most plausible. This corresponds to ∼2–3 degrees C global warming by 2100 with median climate sensitivities, or 1.5–4 degrees C considering climate-system uncertainties. Higher- and lower-emissions scenarios (e.g. RCP2.6 and RCP6.0) might be plausible and should be explored in research. However, high-emission scenarios (RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, SSP3-7.0) seem implausible and should be used with clear rationales and caveats to ensure results are not misinterpreted by scholars, policymakers, and media. We analyse fisheries and aquatic conservation papers published from 2015 to 2022 in major journals, and find that RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 are the most commonly used scenarios, though RCP4.5/SSP2-4.5 use has increased since 2020. Studies predominantly project quantitative rather than qualitative differences between these scenarios’ impacts.

Scientific bottom-trawl surveys are ecological observation programs conducted along continental shelves and slopes of seas and oceans that sample marine communities associated with the seafloor. These surveys report taxa occurrence, abundance and/or weight in space and time, and contribute to fisheries management as well as population and biodiversity research. Bottom-trawl surveys are conducted all over the world and represent a unique opportunity to understand ocean biogeography, macroecology, and global change. However, combining these data together for cross-ecosystem analyses remains challenging. Here, we present an integrated database of 26 publicly available bottom-trawl surveys conducted in national waters of 18 countries that are standardized and pre-processed, covering a total of 2,162 sampled fish taxa and 232,800 hauls collected from 1963 to 2020. We describe the processing steps to create the database, flags, and standardization methods that we developed to assist users in conducting spatio-temporal analyses with stable regional survey footprints. The aim of this database is to support research, marine conservation, and management in the context of global change.

Data and code for R2 of Fredston et al. 2023, "Marine heatwaves are not a dominant driver of change in demersal fishes"

Data and code for Fredston et al. 2023, "Marine heatwaves are not a dominant driver of change in demersal fishes"

Topical application of extracellular calreticulin (eCRT), an ER chaperone protein, in animal models enhances wound healing and induces tissue regeneration evidenced by epidermal appendage neogenesis and lack of scarring. In addition to chemoattraction of cells critical to the wound healing process, eCRT induces abundant neo-dermal extracellular matrix (ECM) formation by 3 days post-wounding. The purpose of this study was to determine the mechanisms involved in eCRT induction of ECM. In vitro, eCRT strongly induces collagen I, fibronectin, elastin, α-smooth muscle actin in human adult dermal (HDFs) and neonatal fibroblasts (HFFs) mainly via TGF-β canonical signaling and Smad2/3 activation; RAP, an inhibitor of LRP1 blocked eCRT ECM induction. Conversely, eCRT induction of α5 and β1 integrins was not mediated by TGF-β signaling nor inhibited by RAP. Whereas eCRT strongly induces ECM and integrin α5 proteins in K41 wild-type mouse embryo fibroblasts (MEFs), CRT null MEFs were unresponsive. The data show that eCRT induces the synthesis and release of TGF-β3 first via LRP1 or other receptor signaling and later induces ECM proteins via LRP1 signaling subsequently initiating TGF-β receptor signaling for intracellular CRT (iCRT)-dependent induction of TGF-β1 and ECM proteins. In addition, TGF-β1 induces 2-3-fold higher level of ECM proteins than eCRT. Whereas eCRT and iCRT converge for ECM induction, we propose that eCRT attenuates TGF-β-mediated fibrosis/scarring to achieve tissue regeneration.

Scenarios are central to fisheries and aquatic conservation research on climate change. Scenarios project future greenhouse-gas emissions, which climate models translate into warming projections. Recent climate research and global development trends have significantly changed our understanding of plausible emissions pathways to 2100 and climate sensitivities to emissions. Here, we review these developments and make recommendations for scenario use in fisheries and aquatic conservation research. Although emissions pathways are uncertain, recent research suggests that scenarios producing approximately 3.4-4.5W/m2 radiative forcing by 2100 (e.g., scenarios SSP2-3.4 and SSP2-4.5/RCP4.5) might be most plausible. This corresponds to approximately 2-3 degrees C global warming by 2100 with median climate sensitivities, or 1.5-4 degrees C considering climate-system uncertainties. Higher- and lower-emissions scenarios (e.g., RCP2.6 and RCP6.0) might be plausible and should be explored in research. However, high-emission scenarios (RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, SSP3-7.0) seem implausible and should be used with clear rationales and caveats to ensure results are not misinterpreted by scholars, policymakers, and media. We analyze fisheries and aquatic conservation papers published from 2015 to 2022 in major journals, and find that RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 are the most commonly used scenarios, though RCP4.5/SSP2-4.5 use has increased since 2020. Studies predominantly project quantitative, rather than qualitative, differences between these scenarios’ impacts.

Climate change projections are central to fisheries and aquatic conservation research, and to planning for a warming world. Such projections include assumptions about future emissions pathways and climate-system sensitivity to emissions. Fisheries and aquatic conservation research typically uses emissions scenarios created for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, recent climate research and global development trends have significantly changed our understanding of the ranges of plausible emissions pathways to 2100 and climate sensitivities. Here, we provide a concise review of these updates to our understanding of climate futures, and we make recommendations for best-practice use of climate change scenarios in fisheries and aquatic conservation research. Although emissions pathways are subject to deep uncertainty, recent research suggests that emissions scenarios producing a range of approximately 3.4-4.5W/m2 radiative forcing by 2100 might be most plausible. With median climate sensitivities, this corresponds to approximately 2-3 degrees C global warming by 2100. Climate-sensitivity uncertainties expand this range to approximately 1.5-4 degrees C. In terms of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), radiative forcing outcomes mostly fall between SSP2-3.4 and SSP2-4.5/RCP4.5, though higher and lower emissions scenarios (e.g., RCP2.6 and RCP6.0) might be plausible and should be explored in research. However, we argue that uses of the highest-emission scenarios (RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, SSP3-7.0)—which currently predominate the literature—should come with clearly articulated rationales and appropriate caveats to ensure results are not misinterpreted by scholars, policymakers, and media.

International audience; Many anthropogenic stressors broadly inflict mortality or reduce fecundity, including habitat destruction, pollution, climate change,invasive species, and multispecies harvesting. Here, we show—in four analytical models ofinterspecies competition—that broadlyinflicted stressors disproportionately cause competitive exclusions within groups of ecologically similar species. As a result, wepredict that ecosystems become progressivelythinner—that is, they have progressively less functional redundancy—as broadlyinflicted stressors become progressively more intense. This may negatively affect the temporal stability of ecosystem functions, butit also buffers ecosystem productivity against stress by favoring species less sensitive to the stressors. Our main result follows fromthe weak limiting similarity principle: species with more similar ecological niches compete more strongly, and their coexistence canbe upset by smaller perturbations. We show that stressors can cause indirect competitive exclusions at much lower stressor intensitythan needed to directly cause species extinction, consistent with the finding of empirical studies that species interactions are often theproximal drivers of local extinctions. The excluded species are more sensitive to the stressor relative to their ecologically similarcompetitors. Moreover, broadly inflicted stressors may cause hydra effects—where higher stressor intensity results in higherabundance for a species with lower sensitivity to the stressor than its competitors. Correlations between stressor impacts andecological niches reduce the potential for indirect competitive exclusions, but they consequently also reducethe buffering effectof ecosystem thinning on ecosystem productivity. Our findings suggest that ecosystems experiencing stress may continue toprovision ecosystem services but lose functional redundancy and stability.

Pollution from land-based run-off threatens coastal ecosystems and the services they provide, detrimentally affecting the livelihoods of millions people on the world's coasts. Planning for linkages among terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems can help managers mitigate the impacts of land-use change on water quality and coastal ecosystem services. We examine the approaches used for land-sea planning, with particular focus on the models currently used to estimate the impacts of land-use change on water quality and fisheries. Our findings could also be applied to other ecosystem services. This Review encompasses modelling of: large scale drivers of land-use change; local activities that cause such change; run-off, dispersal and transformation of pollutants in the coastal ocean; ecological responses to pollutants; socio-economic responses to ecological change; and finally, the design of a planning response. We find that there is a disconnect between the dynamical models that can be used to link land to sea processes and the simple tools that are typically used to inform planning. This disconnect may weaken the robustness of plans to manage dynamic processes. Land-sea planning is highly interdisciplinary, making the development of effective plans a challenge for small teams of managers and decision makers. Synthesis and applications. We propose some guiding principles for where and how dynamic land-sea connections can most effectively be built into planning tools. Tools that can capture pertinent processes are needed, but they must be simple enough to be implemented in regions with limited resources for collecting data, developing models and developing integrated land-sea plans.

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. We first quantified positions for 165 range edges of marine fishes and invertebrates from three U.S. continental shelf regions using up to five decades of survey data and a spatiotemporal model to account for sampling and measurement variability. We then analyzed whether those range edges maintained their edge thermal niche-the temperatures found at the range edge position-over time. A large majority of range edges (88%) maintained either summer or winter temperature extremes at the range edge over the study period, and most maintained both (76%), although not all of those range edges shifted in space. However, we also found numerous range edges-particularly poleward edges and edges in the region that experienced the most warming-that did not shift at all, shifted further than predicted by temperature alone, or shifted opposite the direction expected, underscoring the multiplicity of factors that drive changes in range edge positions. This study suggests that range edges of temperate marine species have largely maintained the same edge thermal niche during periods of rapid change and provides a blueprint for testing whether and to what degree species range edges track temperature in general.

Ocean acidification is a global issue with particular regional significance in the California Current System, where social, economic, and ecological impacts are already occurring. Although ocean acidification is a concern that unifies the entire West Coast region, managing for this phenomenon at a regional scale is complex and further complicated by the large scale and dynamic nature of the region. Currently, data collection relevant to ocean acidification on the West Coast is piecemeal, and cannot capture the primary sources of variability in ocean acidification through time and across the region, hindering collaboration among regional managers. We developed a tool to analyze gaps in the West Coast ocean acidification monitoring network. We describe this tool and discuss how it can enable scientists and marine managers in the California Current System to fill information gaps and better understand and thus respond to ocean acidification through the implementation of management solutions at the local level.

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. We analyzed annual range edge dynamics of marine fishes-both at the individual species level and pooled into cold- and warm-edge assemblages-in a multi-decade time-series of trawl surveys conducted on the Northeast US Shelf during a period of rapid warming. We tested whether cold edges show stronger evidence of climate tracking than warm edges (due to non-climate processes or time lags at the warm edge; the biogeography hypothesis or extinction debt hypothesis), or whether they tracked temperature change equally (due to the influence of habitat suitability; the ecophysiology hypothesis). In addition to exploring correlations with regional temperature change, we calculated species- and assemblage-specific sea bottom and sea surface temperature isotherms and used them to predict range edge position. Cold edges shifted further and tracked sea surface and bottom temperature isotherms to a greater degree than warm edges. Mixed-effects models revealed that for a one-degree latitude shift in isotherm position, cold edges shifted 0.47 degrees of latitude, and warm edges shifted only 0.28 degrees. Our results suggest that cold range edges are tracking climate change better than warm range edges, invalidating the ecophysiology hypothesis. We also found that even among highly mobile marine ectotherms in a global warming hotspot, few species are fully keeping pace with climate.