The Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program Tokyo Symposium 2017 will take place from December 21 to 22, 2017 at the Nippon Foundation Building Lobby in Tokyo, Japan. At the Symposium, participants will…
Variations in climate lead to fluctuations and changes in fish stocks; they can have effects on such things as fish behaviour, distributions and growth. Because of this, fisheries management has to respond dynamically to these fluctuations. If management decisions are made primarily on past patterns, the negative impacts can be exacerbated, especially with climate change.
Phytoplankton are the foundation of ocean life, providing the energy that supports nearly all marine species. Levels of phytoplankton in an ocean area may seem like a good predictor for the amount of fish that can be caught there, but a new study by Nereus Program researchers finds that this relationship is not so straightforward
From November 2 to 13, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) held their annual meeting in San Diego, USA. The meeting celebrated the 25th anniversary of PICES with the theme of looking at the past 25 years and imagining the next 25. Some of the topics of interest included coastal ecosystem stressors, loss or changes of marine biodiversity, changing productivity and species distributions in response to climate change, developing outlooks or forecasts of future ocean ecosystems, and examining climate change impacts on ocean ecosystems and human society.
Nereus Fellow at Princeton Colleen Petrik will be giving a plenary talk entitled “The Response of Fisheries Production to Natural and Anthropogenic Forcing: Past, Present and Future” at the PICES Annual Meeting in San Diego. The talk presents a mechanistic model to represent immature and mature stages of forage fishes, large pelagic fishes, and large demersal fishes, as well as preliminary of fish biomass under (1) pristine non-anthropogenic historical forcing (no anthropogenic CO2, no fishing), (2) historical climate without fishing, (3) historical climate with fishing, (4) and projected business-as-usual climate and fishing.
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.
Climate change is expected to have major impacts on the ocean, the species that live there, and the people who rely it for their food and livelihood. Since the beginning of the 20th century, CO2 emissions from human activities have altered physical and chemical properties of the ocean. The ocean has become warmer and, in some areas, less oxygenated, which has caused changes in the productivity and distribution of marine species.
William Cheung, Director of the Nereus Program (Science) and Principle Investigator, recently presented Nereus Program work at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Workshop on Regional Climate Projections and their Use in Impacts and Risk Analysis Studies, held at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espacias, Brazil from September 15-18.
Charles Stock (Nereus Principal Investigator, NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory), Kelly Kearney (Nereus Alumni, Princeton), Yoshitaka Ota (Nereus Director, Policy, UBC) and William Cheung (Nereus Director, Science, UBC) participated in the ICES/PICES Workshop on Modelling Effects of Climate Change on Fish and Fisheries organized by NOAA in Seattle, from August 10 to 12.
