Based on the current trajectory of human-induced impacts on the environment, it is clear that we are pushing the oceans and marine ecosystems to unprecedented limits. Environmental changes in ocean properties have led to an array of ecological responses, from shifts in the composition of the ocean’s phytoplankton to changing distributions of fish species.
Climate change could affect temperatures all over the world, but what may not be immediately apparent is that climate change will affect ocean temperatures. If CO2 emission rates do not change, the average sea surface temperature is expected to increase by 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This may not seem like much, but it would impact oceans in many ways, making them quite different from how they are today.
Climate change is resulting in the earlier arrival of spring conditions in many ecosystems around the world. Rebecca Asch, Nereus Fellow (Princeton), gave a lecture at Wellesley College, USA, on November 13 entitled “Climate Change and Seasonality in the Oceans: How will Changing Seasonal Cycles Affect Marine Food Webs?” This was an invited talk sponsored by the Department of Biological Sciences.
From November 20 to December 11, leaders from more than 195 countries will meet in Paris to discuss the future of the planet. But will oceans be on the agenda?
COP21, the “Conference of Parties”, is the 21st United Nations Conference on Climate Change. It is being hyped as the most important climate event since COP15 in Copenhagen, which produced the Copenhagen Accord — a political agreement that was deemed by many to be unsuccessful. Here Yoshitaka Ota, Nereus Director (Policy), and William Cheung, Nereus Director (Science), discuss whether these negotiations will be successful, what’s at stake for the future of the world’s oceans, and what else can be done to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Colleen Petrik, Senior Nereus Fellow at Princeton, visited the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the University of Stockholm from October 26 to 30 to collaborate with former Nereus Fellow James Watson. While with the Nereus Program, Watson developed a simulation model of global fish biomass distribution. This model demonstrated that the ability of fish to swim towards high food and growth environments had a drastic effect on the spatial distribution of fish biomass, especially that of top predators.
Gabriel Reygondeau, Nereus Fellow (UBC), has co-authored a paper entitled “Reliability of spatial and temporal patterns of C. finmarchicus inferred from the CPR survey” in the Journal of Marine Systems.
The fourth Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) IMBIZO (a Zulu word meaning ‘meeting or gathering’) workshop took place at the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia and Geofisica (OGS) in Trieste, Italy, from October 26 to 30th, 2015. The meeting gathered scientists and researchers from all over the world to discuss how we integrate knowledge of marine and human systems, and address multiple scales and stressors.
Water spills from the edge of a giant, melting iceberg on the cover of the November 2015 issue of Science.
The special issue focused on the effects of climate change on our ocean systems, and highlighted research by Dr. William Cheung, an Associate Professor with the Changing Ocean Research Unit at the University of British Columbia, and Director (Science) of the Nereus Program. The journal used a map Dr. Cheung and his team created that describes the effects of changing water temperatures on fish species migration.
New media coverage from Science, BBC News, South China Morning Post, International Business Times, Undercurrent News and more.
Vicky Lam, Fisheries Economist and Senior Research Fellow (UBC), was invited by the Fraser Basin Council to give a presentation on the impacts of climate change on fisheries on the coast of northwest British Columbia, Canada. She attended the one day workshop titled “Warming Oceans and Rising Tides: Coastal Adaptation in Northwest BC”, in Prince Rupert on October 21.
