Coastal SEES (Track 2), Collaborative Research: Resilience and Adaptation of a Coastal Ecological-Economic System in Response to Increasing Temperature

气候变化正在迅速改变海洋环境，生物对这些变化表现出复杂的反应。对于许多鱼类和无脊椎动物来说，温度的变化正在改变它们特有的空间和季节分布。渔业在不断变化的海洋环境和当地经济之间提供了双向联系。随着物种分布和丰度的变化，在哪里、什么时候、捕获多少鱼也会发生变化。渔业也对经济状况或管理政策作出反应，从而对鱼类种群产生反馈。为了了解变暖对渔业生态系统的影响，必须考虑人口、渔业和市场之间的动态相互作用。该项目将对沿海海洋环境中气候变化、海洋学、生态学和经济学之间的复杂关系进行综合研究。缅因湾拥有经济上有价值的龙虾和底栖鱼渔业，为了解这些动态联系提供了理想的试验台。调查人员和管理人员之间的长期关系将确保将研究成果纳入管理过程，以帮助维持面临气候变化的渔业。该项目将培养早期职业科学家、博士后研究人员、研究生和本科生。通过缅因湾研究所的LabVenture！该项目还将开发一个动手教育模块，教缅因州的五年级和六年级学生（每年约10,000名学生）如何使用计算机模型来理解海洋中的复杂相互作用。该项目的主要目标是了解温度变化如何在渔业中传播，影响捕捞鱼类的数量和价值，以及渔业如何对改变的经济激励作出反应，影响鱼类的丰度。该项目将采用多学科、多尺度的方法来测试一系列海洋学、生态学和经济学假设，但主要成果将是建立一个动态模型，以探索温度趋势和温暖事件对相互关联的生态-渔业-经济系统的影响。该项目将描述西北大西洋和缅因湾地表和底部温度的时空变化特征，重点是了解大震级事件的频率和形成。将利用该地区的全球气候模式输出来估计下个世纪这些事件的预期变化。温度分析的结果将用于了解物种分布在空间和时间上如何因变暖和变暖事件而变化。温度变化对龙虾和底栖鱼种群动态的影响及其市场对供应变化的反应将被量化。这些信息将被纳入一个龙虾和底栖鱼种群、渔业和市场的模型，该模型将用于研究变暖对这些目标种群数量和每个渔业的经济绩效的影响。该项目得到了美国国家科学基金会沿海可持续发展科学、工程和教育项目的支持。

Climate change is rapidly altering conditions in the ocean, and organisms exhibit complex responses to these changes. For many fish and invertebrates, changing temperatures are altering their characteristic spatial and seasonal distributions. Fisheries provide a two-way connection between changing ocean environments and local economies. As the distribution and abundance of species change, where, when, and how many fish are caught will change. Fisheries also respond to economic conditions or management policies, leading to feedbacks onto fish populations. In order to understand the impact of warming on fisheries ecosystems, it is essential to account for dynamical interactions between populations, fisheries, and markets. This project will develop an integrated view of the complex relationships between climate change, oceanography, ecology, and economics in a coastal marine setting. The Gulf of Maine, which includes economically valuable lobster and groundfish fisheries, provides an ideal test-bed to understand these dynamic linkages. Long-standing relationships between investigators and managers will ensure that research results are integrated into management processes to help sustain fisheries in the face of climate change. The project will train early-career scientists, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Through the Gulf of Maine Research Institute's LabVenture! program, the project will also develop a hands-on education module to teach Maine's 5th and 6th graders (~10,000 students/year) how computer models are used to understand complex interactions in the ocean. The main goal of this project is to understand how changes in temperature propagate through fisheries, influencing the amount and value of the fish caught, and how fisheries respond to altered economic incentives, influencing the abundance of fish. The project will employ a multidisciplinary, multi-scale approach to test an array of oceanographic, ecological, and economic hypotheses, but the main outcome will be a dynamical model to explore the impacts of temperature trends and warm events on a linked ecological-fishery-economic system. The project will characterize spatial and temporal variability in surface and bottom temperatures in the Northwest Atlantic and Gulf of Maine, focusing on understanding the frequency and formation of large-magnitude events. The expected change in these events in the next century will be estimated using global climate model output for the region. Outputs from the temperature analysis will be used to understand how species distributions change in space and time due to warming and warm events. The impact of temperature changes on the population dynamics of lobsters and groundfish and the response of their markets to supply changes will be quantified. This information will be integrated into a model of lobster and groundfish populations, fisheries, and markets, which will be used to examine the impact of warming on the abundance of these target populations and on the economic performance of each fishery.This project is supported under NSF's Coastal SEES (Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability) program.