Marine species shifts and their drivers

Global climate change is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has had considerable impact on global biogeography. Rising temperatures, ocean deoxgynetation and acidification, and changing precipitation patterns have resulted in considerable shifts in species ranges and abundances. This is true for marine species as well, most of whom are ectotherms and thus sensitive to shifts in temperature. Global fisheries productivity has dropped over the past 20 years^[1] and there have been concerns about fish stocks moving out of their current management jurisdictions and crossing international maritime boundaries^[2,3].

There has been a considerable number of published studes that describes marine species range shifts either for single or multiple species including large scale meta-analyses that synthesize results of multiple studies to provide insights into global or regional patterns of range shifts. The consensus is that marine species are tracking climate change (specifically climate velocity; or the speed and direction at which climate is moving across a unit landscapes) and moving to cooler and deeper waters.

My goal with this project is to utilize a large collection of bottom trawl survey datasets to produce standardized estimates of marine fish range shifts and then investigate their natural and anthropogenic drivers. This study will also allow us to guage whether we have been over or under estimating marine range shifts.

References

[1] Free, C. M., Thorson, J. T., Pinsky, M. L., Oken, K. L., Wiedenmann, J., & Jensen, O. P. (2019). Impacts of historical warming on marine fisheries production. Science, 363(6430), 979–983. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau1758

[2] Palacios-Abrantes, J., Santos, B. S., Frölicher, T. L., Reygondeau, G., Sumaila, U., Wabnitz, C. C. C., & Cheung, W. W. L. (2025). Climate change drives shifts in straddling fish stocks in the world’s ocean. Science Advances, 11(31). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adq5976

[3] Pinsky, M. L., Reygondeau, G., Caddell, R., Palacios-Abrantes, J., Spijkers, J., & Cheung, W. W. L. (2018). Preparing ocean governance for species on the move. Science, 360(6394), 1189–1191. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat2360