By Julia Mason, Nereus Fellow at Stanford University
I got to spend a few weeks this August doing my very favorite activity: playing field assistant for a friend in a beautiful place. The closest I get to fieldwork for my own research is interviewing fishermen—fun and exciting in its own way, but it’s still a treat to put on my ecologist hat (or rather, mask) and jump in the water.
West Africa may be one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change. The region is highly dependent on fisheries for livelihoods and as an important food source. The marine resources of West Africa are currently threatened by overfishing and climate change-induced ocean warming could see fish stocks migrate away from the area and into cooler waters. If CO2 emissions continue at their current levels, the region could see a 50% decline in fisheries-related jobs and a total annual loss of US$311 million, found a study by Nereus Program researchers.
According to the FAO, anchovy and sardine made up 13% of global catch in 2012. These small fish are consumed by humans, marine mammals, seabirds, squid, and other fish. They are also used for aquaculture feed, industrial oil, and health supplements. “Climate, Anchovy, and Sardine” a new study in the Annual Review of Marine Science, co-authored by Nereus Alumni Rebecca Asch (Princeton University) and Ryan Rykaczewski (University of South Carolina), reviews the past, present, and future of anchovy and sardine.
The ten most popular stories on the Nereus Program website in 2016, including on El Ninos, fishing subsidies, Brexit, science fiction prototyping, the TPP, salps, jellyfish fisheries, vaquita and the South China Sea.
The study “Biogeochemical regions of the Mediterranean Sea: an objective multidimensional and multivariate environmental approach” was recently published in Progress in Oceanography with Nereus Fellow Gabriel Reygondeau (UBC) as the lead author. In the paper, a biogeochemical/ecological spatial framework was defined for ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea.
Heatwaves are occurring not only on the land but also in the sea, notably “The Blob” in Northeast Pacific and a shorter heatwave on Australia’s west coast in 2010 and 2011. Nereus Alumnus Thomas Frölicher outlines what he calls these “two exceptional heatwaves in the ocean” in his post “Heatwaves in the ocean – a risk to ecosystems?” on the Zukunftsblog – Facts and Views on Sustainability. He discusses the impact these heatwaves have on marine species and ecosystems.
Gerald Singh is a Nereus Fellow working with Yoshitaka Ota and Andres Cisneros-Montemayor and collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme. Gerald is characterizing the contribution of a sustainable ocean to achieving broad sustainable development goals. Using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework, Gerald is researching how the SDGs are dependent on achieving sustainable use and management of the ocean.
By Jenn Paul Glaser, Nereus Program Consulting Artist
Our goal was to produce painterly digital collages that were conceptual in nature but grounded in state-of-the-art research. The culminating body depicted a total of about 30 species within at least 16 diverse marine ecosystems.
The ocean has provided incredible services for us — taking up 28% of carbon emissions since preindustrial levels and absorbing 93% of the Earth’s excess heat since the 1970s — but because of this, it is undergoing changes. In order to manage ocean ecosystems and resources in the future, we must begin to understand what those changes may look like using climate change impact projections.
By Rebecca Asch, Senior Nereus Fellow, Princeton University
The Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Summer Workshop is an annual event where scientists leading research on the carbon cycle and circulation of nutrients in the ocean meet to discuss advances in their field and jointly plan new research initiatives. This year it was held from July 25 to 28 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, USA.
