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Future trends of marine fish biomass distributions from the North Sea to the Barents Sea

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Fabrice StephensonORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

© The Author(s) 2024. Climate warming is one of the facets of anthropogenic global change predicted to increase in the future, its magnitude depending on present-day decisions. The north Atlantic and Arctic Oceans are already undergoing community changes, with warmer-water species expanding northwards, and colder-water species retracting. However, the future extent and implications of these shifts remain unclear. Here, we fitted a joint species distribution model to occurrence data of 107, and biomass data of 61 marine fish species from 16,345 fishery independent trawls sampled between 2004 and 2022 in the northeast Atlantic Ocean, including the Barents Sea. We project overall increases in richness and declines in relative dominance in the community, and generalised increases in species’ ranges and biomass across three different future scenarios in 2050 and 2100. The projected decline of capelin and the practical extirpation of polar cod from the system, the two most abundant species in the Barents Sea, drove an overall reduction in fish biomass at Arctic latitudes that is not replaced by expanding species. Furthermore, our projections suggest that Arctic demersal fish will be at high risk of extinction by the end of the century if no climate refugia is available at eastern latitudes.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Gordo-Vilaseca C, Costello MJ, Coll M, Juterbock A, Reiss H, Stephenson F

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Nature Communications

Year: 2024

Volume: 15

Online publication date: 05/07/2024

Acceptance date: 25/06/2024

Date deposited: 15/07/2024

ISSN (electronic): 2041-1723

Publisher: Springer Nature

URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49911-9

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-49911-9

Data Access Statement: The data used in this study was obtained from bottom trawling data collated within the FishGlob (Accessible at https://github.com/AquaAuma/fishglob_data). The Norwegian Sea section of this data is no longer available in FishGlob, and needs to be directly asked for to the Norwegian Marine Data Centre (https://metadata.nmdc.no/metadata-api/landingpage/f77112db062b5924d079a54b311260fb). The environmental data used for calibrating the model came from the ‘Global Ocean Physics Reanalysis’ and the ‘Global Ocean Biogeochemistry Hindcast’ both of which were available through the Marine Copernicus repository at https://data.marine.copernicus.eu/products. Bottom depth was obtained from BioOracle at https://www.bio-oracle.org. The environmental data used for future projections came from the second version of the IPSL climate model (IPSL- CMIP6), and is fully accessible as well at https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/search/cmip6-dkrz/

PubMed id: 38965212


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
'Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence' accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)
Spanish National Project ProOceans (PID2020−118097RB-I00)

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