Effects of Climate Change on Fish and Fisheries: Modeling Workshop.

Global warming is already changing the structure and function of some of the worlds ocean ecosystems with further changes expected over time as air and water temperatures rise. These ecosystem changes include altered physical properties (e.g., ocean temperatures, currents, stratification, dispersal), and associated lower trophic level responses to changing ocean conditions (e.g., shifts in the timing of key life cycle events, the distribution and the productivity of phytoplankton and zooplankton), which in-turn are projected to strongly affect fish stocks. Changes in the abundance and distribution of commercially important fish stocks have large consequences for communities and economies from local to national scales that depend on them. Therefore, to plan for the future, managers and governments must have access to projected scenarios of the implications of climate change on marine ecosystems. Such data are particularly important for various sectors including oil, gas, and fishing to determine where to conduct their activities. With realistic climate and ecological predictions, managers and policy decision makers can determine which management strategies will be most effective. Members of the ICES/PICES Strategic Initiative on Climate Change effects on Marine Ecosystems (SICCME) are coordinating a three-day workshop to conduct a multi-model comparative analysis of projected climate change scenarios on fish distribution and abundance. The initiative involves comparisons of multi-model scenarios within selected regions and comparisons of multi-model scenarios between regions for a selected suite of species that share similar traits and trophic position. The regions of interest for this proposal include: the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the California Current, the central north Pacific, and the coastal western North Pacific.

To convene a three-day workshop to discuss the development of a global modeling framework to enable the marine science community to understand and project the implications of climate change on marine ecosystems and the fisheries that depend on them. The workshop will gather 30 of the leading scientists within the fields of climate research, fisheries biology, and marine ecology from the international community to: 1) build a community of research partners needed and coordinate international efforts to assess how climate change is projected to impact ecosystems with a focus on consequences for fish, 2) identify the similarities and differences in climate projections to gain insight into sources of uncertainty associated with model misspecification errors, 3) to establish a framework to provide quantitative estimates of the impacts of climate change on major fish and fisheries around the world by 2050, and 4) to develop a synthesis paper based on the discussions from the workshop to be published in a peer-review journal.