Dr Rhian Evans1, Dr Ben P. Harvey2, Dr Katie E. Marshall3, Mr Callum J. Hudson4, Dr Alistair J. Hobday5, Assoc. Prof. Bayden D. Russell1,6
1Swire Institute of Marine Science and Area of Ecology and Biodiversity, School of Biological Sciences, Hong Kong SAR, China, 2Shimoda Marine Research Center, University of Tsukuba , 5-10-1 Shimoda, Japan, 3Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 4Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University , 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son,, Japan, 5CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Hobart , Australia, 6The Dove Marine Laboratory, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University , Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are extreme warm-water events that often result in devastating impacts on ecosystems. Individuals and populations respond to these events through physiological resistance, migration, or local extinction depending on species-specific functional traits and physiology. Marine aquaculture is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and is likely to play an essential role in future food security. Mariculture often occurs in nearshore areas which are highly susceptible to warming, with organisms in a confined geographical location. Together this indicates that MHWs potentially pose a significant risk to mariculture activities, and yet key knowledge gaps hinder our ability to predict how future production will be affected to ensure proactive management of resources. Here, we used an ensemble of CMIP6 climate models combined with species physiology to project the effects of future MHWs on the growth and potential production of ~60 invertebrate and fish species from east and southeast Asia. We resolved species-specific thermal growth curves and used these in combination with critical thermal tolerance limits to estimate changes in the distribution of mariculture activities from present to 2100 under future climate scenarios. Finally, we estimated the risk that the production of a particular species would decline, or potentially increase, under future MHWs. This provides the first spatially explicit, species-level assessment of the potential for MHWs to cause production declines. This framework provides the first planning tool to manage, and perhaps mitigate, some of the effects of future MHWs for the region that provides >70% of the world’s aquaculture.
Biography:
Dr Rhian Evans is a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Hong Kong, combining projections of marine heatwaves and the physiology of different species to model their potential response to climate change at a population level.
