Recent pace of change in human impact on the world’s ocean

By B. Halpern, Melanie Frazier, J. Afflerbach, Julia S. Lowndes, Fiorenza Micheli, C. O’Hara, Courtney Scarborough, K. Selkoe. Scientific Reports, 2019

728 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humans interact with the oceans in diverse and profound ways. The scope, magnitude, footprint and ultimate cumulative impacts of human activities can threaten ocean ecosystems and have changed over time, resulting in new challenges and threats to marine ecosystems. A fundamental gap in understanding how humanity is affecting the oceans is our limited knowledge about the pace of change in cumulative impact on ocean ecosystems from expanding human activities – and the patterns, locations and drivers of most significant change. To help address this, we combined high resolution, annual data on the intensity of 14 human stressors and their impact on 21 marine ecosystems over 11 years (2003–2013) to assess pace of change in cumulative impacts on global oceans, where and how much that pace differs across the ocean, and which stressors and their impacts contribute most to those changes. We found that most of the ocean (59%) is experiencing significantly increasing cumulative impact, in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution and shipping. Nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk. Mitigation of stressors most contributing to increases in overall cumulative impacts is urgently needed to sustain healthy oceans.

Subfields: Ecology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54d450086e6707b6a55dea8a90eaaf7db26f09ba

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In Ecology

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Citations in the corpus

Calibrating Environmental DNA Metabarcoding to Conventional Surveys for Measuring Fish Species Richness (2020, background): “…compositional and geographic shifts (Pecl et al., 2017; Blowes et al., 2019) and are confronted with numerous threats (Tilman et al., 2017; Halpern et al., 2019; Reid et al., 2019), so it is critical that we better understand if eDNA metabarcoding could facilitate broad biodiversity…”
Multispecies tracking reveals a major seabird hotspot in the North Atlantic (2021, background): “Such migratory species are increasingly exposed to the expanding cumulative human impacts in the oceans (Halpern et al., 2019).”