Effects of climate‐driven primary production change on marine food webs: implications for fisheries and conservation

By C. Brown, Elizabeth A. Fulton, A. Hobday, R. Matear, Hugh P. Possingham, C. Bulman, Villy Christensen, Robyn E. Forrest, P. Gehrke, N. Gribble and 7 more. 2010

234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change is altering the rate and distribution of primary production in the world's oceans. Primary production is critical to maintaining biodiversity and supporting fishery catches, but predicting the response of populations to primary production change is complicated by predation and competition interactions. We simulated the effects of change in primary production on diverse marine ecosystems across a wide latitudinal range in Australia using the marine food web model Ecosim. We link models of primary production of lower trophic levels (phytoplankton and benthic producers) under climate change with Ecosim to predict changes in fishery catch, fishery value, biomass of animals of conservation interest, and indicators of community composition. Under a plausible climate change scenario, primary production will increase around Australia and generally this benefits fisheries catch and value and leads to increased biomass of threatened marine animals such as turtles and sharks. However, community composition is not strongly affected. Sensitivity analyses indicate overall positive linear responses of functional groups to primary production change. Responses are robust to the ecosystem type and the complexity of the model used. However, model formulations with more complex predation and competition interactions can reverse the expected responses for some species, resulting in catch declines for some fished species and localized declines of turtle and marine mammal populations under primary productivity increases. We conclude that climate‐driven primary production change needs to be considered by marine ecosystem managers and more specifically, that production increases can simultaneously benefit fisheries and conservation. Greater focus on incorporating predation and competition interactions into models will significantly improve the ability to identify species and industries most at risk from climate change.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be06185bdbd2d046002c7343d60180ba72b2b2cf

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Citations in the corpus

The Mediterranean Sea under siege: spatial overlap between marine biodiversity, cumulative threats and marine reserves (2012, background): “They also represent important case studies for a further analysis of the impacts of cumulative anthropogenic threats on marine communities and food webs using a combination of advanced data analysis and modelling tools (e.g. Brown et al., 2010).”
Observed and predicted effects of climate on Australian seabirds (2011, background): “Consideration also needs to be given to incorporating uncertainties in changes in the distribution of species, changes in species interactions, and ecosystem responses into current modelling of climate change effects on seabirds (Brown et al. 2010).”
Climate change cascades: Shifts in oceanography, species' ranges and subtidal marine community dynamics in eastern Tasmania (2011, background): “…understanding of the interactions between effects of climate change on individual taxa and the way that interactions between species mediate these effects is critical, both for marine resource management and our ability to make projections regarding future change (Hulme, 2005; Brown et al., 2010).”
Climate-change induced tropicalisation of marine communities in Western Australia (2012, background): “Overall, change in distribution area and primary productivity will likely lead to re-distribution of potential catch (Cheung et al. 2008a, 2009, 2011a; Brown et al. 2010) and this redistribution needs to be reflected in spatial management arrangement.”