Coastal and offshore marine ecosystems of the North Pacific are impacted by increasing temperature, changing iron supply, harmful algal bloom events, invasive species, hypoxia/eutrophication and ocean acidification. These multiple pressures can act synergistically to change ecosystem structure, function and dynamics in unexpected ways that differ from single pressure responses. It is also likely that pressures and responses will vary geographically. A key objective of the FUTURE program is to identify and characterize these pressures in order to facilitate comparative studies of North Pacific ecosystem responses to multiple stressors and how these systems might change in the future.
This session has two primary objectives: 1) to identify key stressors and pressures on North Pacific marine ecosystems, and to compare how these stressors/pressures may differ in importance in different systems and how they may be changing in time; and 2) to identify ecosystem responses to these multiple stressors and pressures, including gaining an understanding of how natural and human perturbations may cascade through ecosystems, and whether there may be amplifiers or buffers which modify the effects of perturbations on marine systems. Papers using conceptual, model-based, observation-based, or experimental-based approaches are welcome, as well as papers which evaluate approaches to linking pressures to ecosystem changes, such as pathways of effects or driver-pressure-state-impact-response models. The overall goal of this session is to obtain an overview of the pressures being experienced by North Pacific marine ecosystems, how these pressures may be changing with time, variation in these pressures (both singly and in combination) among regions, and the combined effects of pressures, both now and in the future, on the marine ecosystems of the North Pacific.
S2: Regional climate modeling in the North Pacific
Convenors:
Enrique Curchitser (USA) Chan Joo Jang (Korea)
Invited Speakers: Michael Foreman (Institute of Ocean Sciences, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada) Arthur Miller (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, USA) Takashi Mochizuki (JAMSTEC, Japan)
Regional climate models (RCMs) are vital tools for understanding changes in regional climate. They serve as a good starting point for many socio-economic impact and adaptation considerations to climate changes. Despite their limitations, including systematic errors in forcing fields supplied by global climate models, RCMs are the most promising means of providing information on regional climate changes, mainly through their ability to accommodate much higher spatial resolution. This session invites papers addressing RCM efforts including downscaling techniques, assessment of added values of RCMs in comparison with global climate models, identification and evaluation of regional climate changes in the North Pacific Ocean simulated from global climate models, assessment of RCM uncertainty, and coupling of RCMs to ecosystem models. The goal of the session is to assemble and access existing regional climate modeling efforts, providing a platform to discuss limitation and reliability of RCMs.
S3: Challenges in communicating science and engaging the public
Convenors:
Hal Batchelder (USA) Robin Brown (Canada) Shin-ichi Ito (Japan) Oleg Katugin (Russia) Phillip Mundy (USA) William Peterson (USA) Chang-Ik Zhang (Korea)
Invited Speaker: William Peterson (Hatfield Marine Science Center, NOAA-Fisheries, USA) Satoquo Seino (Kyushu University, Japan)
Communicating scientific findings to the public has never been more important and challenging than in the present era of global climate change unfolding against the backdrop of rapidly accelerating human population growth. Engaging the public in factually based dialogs about environmental change and its impacts on the ecosystems on which we depend is increasingly challenging. The compelling existential nature of the discussion has attracted people of many different professions and cultures who speak a wide variety of mutually unintelligible jargons and many different national languages. As members of the international marine scientific community served by PICES, we are mindful that the first language of most participants is not English and that those from outside our area of specialization do not necessarily share our professional lexicon.
FUTURE is remarkable as a marine scientific program that explicitly addresses the area of public education and outreach within the broader scientific context of identifying major sources of uncertainty and impediments to improving the skill of assessments and forecasts, suggesting research areas for priority development, and providing coordination of potential PICES products through the FUTURE Advisory Panel on Status, Outlooks, Forecasts, and Engagement (SOFE).
Building on expertise and information in workshop (W2) that precedes the session, this session welcomes papers that address challenges presented by uncertainty in the uptake of forecasts by decision makers within the context of communication challenges presented by the diversity of disciplines and languages necessary to address global climate change. We encourage contributions or case study reports that illustrate effective ways of communicating outlooks/forecasts of climate change impacts to specific audiences/communities. The context of communication challenges presented by the diversity of disciplines and languages necessary to address global climate change established during the session will form the basis for setting priorities in FUTURE products.
S4: Ecosystem status, trends and forecasts S4 is combined with S6
Convenors:
Hiroaki Saito (Japan) Thomas Therriault (Canada)
Invited Speaker: Deborah Steinberg (Virginia Institute of Marine Science, USA)
Marine ecosystems are constantly changing. Therefore, researchers need to develop and to communicate information on ecosystem status, trends, and forecasts to ensure that sound management and policy decisions are made for the benefit of the societies that depend on them. Ecosystem indicators are one way to communicate such information, but the selection of the most appropriate indicators can prove challenging, especially given increasingly complex array of audiences. It is likely that different indicators will be needed where the scale of ecosystem responses to different stressors must be reconciled with the scale of the perturbation (e.g., coastal versus oceanic). Forecast ecosystem change demands good understanding of how multiple stressors affect ecosystem structure and function. A key element of the FUTURE program is the ability to convey to diverse audiences, in each of the PICES member countries, ecosystem status, trends and forecasts. This session will explore current and proposed ecosystem status and trend indicators, including some already in use in the North Pacific Ecosystem Status Reports, and attempt to identify metrics required in support of ecosystem forecasts.
S5: Mechanisms of change: Processes behind climate variability in the North Pacific
Convenors:
Emanuele Di Lorenzo (USA) Michael Foreman (Canada) Shoshiro Minobe (Japan)
Invited Speakers: Mat Collins (University of Exeter, UK)
Taka Ito (Georgia Institute of Technology , USA) Nate Mantua (Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA-Fisheries, USA)
In recent years, much progress has been made in our understanding of the large-scale physical dynamics of Pacific climate variability and change. New modes of ocean and atmospheric variability over the Pacific have been recognized and shown to influence ecosystem processes. The impact that these modes have on marine biophysical interactions in upwelling systems has also become a research focus under a new collaboration between CLIVAR and IMBER, to which PICES is contributing. Diagnosing the mechanisms underlying the statistical correlations between the physical forcing and the ecosystem response strongly relies on our ability to model and synthesize the processes controlling the variability in the climate system, and unveiling the dominant set of physical controls on marine ecosystem dynamics. This synthesis activity is a core component of FUTURE and involves developing low-order (e.g., low number of dimensions) process-models of the climate system, which reduce the complex processes to their most basic and dominant mechanics. Process-models such as these can be used statistically to provide uncertainty estimates of decadal variability in recent historical climate and ecosystem time series, and to provide improved metrics to test the mechanisms of climate variability and change in IPCC models.
This session invites contributions that combine model and observational methods to provide syntheses of the mechanisms controlling North Pacific climate variability, and that show how these improved syntheses enable better diagnosing and predicting of the dynamics of Pacific climate and of the marine ecosystem responses to climate forcing. We also welcome contributions that explore new mechanisms of physical-biological linkages that can only be partially tested with currently available observations, yet provide the theoretical foundation to understand the dynamics of Pacific climate variability and its impact on marine populations, and develop new observational programs. During the session there will be discussion time where the contributors will be asked to participate in developing a synthesis paper on North Pacific climate variability as part of the PICES WG27 activities (http://wg27.pices.int).
Marine ecosystems around the globe are affected by a number of natural and anthropogenic stressors. The interactions among stressors are incredibly complex and proving difficult to understand. Ultimately, these stressors will change ecosystem structure and function. This can lead to changes in ecosystem stability and productivity, and impact the societies that depend on them. One of the central themes of the FUTURE Science Plan focuses on ecosystem resiliency and vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic stressors and poses the question how ecosystems around the North Pacific might change in the future. Thus, the ability to understand how resilient marine ecosystems are and to characterize the degree to which ecosystems are vulnerable to change via multiple stressors is critical to advancing the FUTURE program. This session will explore all aspects of ecosystem resilience and vulnerability, including ways to identify and characterize it.
S7: Strategies for ecosystem management in a changing climate
Convenors:
Manuel Barange (UK) Anne Hollowed (USA) Suam Kim (Korea)
Invited Speaker:
Scott Large on behalf of Jason Link (NOAA Fisheries, USA)
This session will explore the complex issue of implementing an ecosystem approach to management under changing climate conditions. Climate change is expected to impact the distribution and abundance of fish and shellfish through direct and indirect pathways. The temporal signature of these changes will be dominated by long term trends and thus may necessitate new approaches to setting biological reference points for single species management. Projection models indicate that climate change will affect the distribution and/or abundance of particular species, which in-turn would alter the structure and function of the system. New approaches may be needed to address the complex issues of defining biological and ecosystem reference points under uncertain future states of nature. For fished stocks that are projected to decline under changing climate conditions, it is unclear when or if additional precautionary approaches would sustain the populations or the fishery that depends on them. This session seeks papers that: 1) explore implementations of an ecosystem approach to management under projected climate change, 2) propose techniques that identify how uncertainty in climate and biological responses can be incorporated into biological or ecosystem reference points, 3) evaluate the performance of proposed strategies under changing climate, and 4) define the precautionary approach under changing climate.
S8: Human dimension indicators of the status of the North Pacific ecosystem
Convenors:
Keith R. Criddle (USA) Mitsutaku Makino (Japan)
Invited Speakers: Patrick Christie (University of Washington, USA)
Jake Rice (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada)
Forecasting and understanding trends, uncertainty and responses of the North Pacific ecosystem requires an understanding anthropogenic pressures on marine ecosystems, the impacts of ecosystem change on dependent human populations, and social strategies to cope with those changes. This session will present human dimension indicators that have been created or assembled for the next North Pacific Ecosystem Status Report (NPESR). The session will be composed of invited and contributed papers that elucidate commonalities and differences in regional trends of these indicators and their spatio-temporal linkages to ecosystem status indicators and to human well-being.
W1: Top predators as indicators of climate change: statistical techniques, challenges and opportunities
Convenors:
Steven Bograd (USA)
Elliott Hazen (USA)
Takashi Yamamoto (Japan)
Invited Speakers: Emanuele Di Lorenzo (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) Jeffrey Polovina (Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, NOAA-Fisheries, USA) William Sydeman (Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research, USA) Kevin Weng (University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA)
Top predators such as fish, turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds integrate multiple lower trophic level processes and can also exert top-down control of marine food webs. Climate change and variability affect the timing and productivity of pelagic ecosystems. This variability is integrated into the life histories of top predators, potentially affecting their breeding patterns, migration strategies, diets, and ultimately fitness and reproductive success. Pan-Pacific data about top predators are generated by surveys, animal tracking studies, dietary analyses, and measurements of reproductive performance. Environmental and climate data can be synthesized and compared to ecosystem responses in many locations. This workshop invites participants to present and to discuss topics that address: (1) oceanographic and top predator datasets that can be used to examine responses to climate variability and change, (2) statistical techniques that can be used in differentiating top predator responses to climate variability and climate change, (3) identification of sentinel species that respond directly to climate effects and can be used as leading indicators of ecosystem state, and (4) synthetic approaches to understanding how climate variability and change is incorporated in top predator distribution, abundance, or foraging datasets. From the workshop, a pan-Pacific meta-analysis and review paper examining this subject are planned.
W2: Bridging the divide between models and decision-making: The role of uncertainty in the uptake of forecasts by decision makers
Convenors:
Harold Batchelder (USA) Kai Chan (Canada) Edward Gregr (Canada) Shin-ichi Ito (Japan) Vladimir Kulik (Russia) Naesun Park (Korea) Ian Perry (Canada) Jameal Samhouri (USA) Motomitsu Takahashi (Japan)
Invited Speakers: Georgina Gibson (International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA) Lee Failing (Compass Resource Management Ltd., Canada)
Uncertainty is a key theme of the FUTURE program. Scientific uncertainty extends beyond the outputs of oceanographic or ecosystem models and has significant consequences on human dimensions ranging from public and stakeholder perception to tactical and strategic decision making by managers and policy makers. The workshop will consider uncertainty along the entire path from data, through model design and implementation to communication and uptake of results by decision makers. Such end-to-end consideration of uncertainty is critical to improve the uptake of oceanographic model results by stakeholders and decision makers in all PICES member countries, particularly as the modeling community moves towards end-to-end models, and faces the challenges of managing multiple stressors. This workshop will thus bridge two central themes of the FUTURE Open Science Meeting: quantification and measurement of uncertainty in observations and projects, and communication and engagement in the development and dissemination of FUTURE products.
The workshop will be centered on two themes. The first of them concerns input data, model structure, and parameterization, and will focus on how sources of uncertainty can be articulated and presented on a technical level. This theme challenges the modeling community to explain the credibility of their results, articulate their assumptions, and generally expose sources of uncertainty. Models of any topic including stock assessment, ecosystem dynamics, and cumulative effects are welcome.
The second theme will consider decision analysis and decision making, including psychological insights into how people perceive, understand, and incorporate complex information into decision-making. Discussions will focus on: (1) how FUTURE can best articulate uncertainty assessments, and develop a communication strategy to broaden the engagement of the public, communities, decision makers and other stakeholders in the results emerging from FUTURE; and (2) how FUTURE products can link to coastal communities, with an emphasis on how and to what degree these products are relevant to the communities whose decisions they presume to affect. This includes the fundamental challenge of how to scale FUTURE scientific outputs with impacts on human dimensions, generally considered at more local extents. This theme in particular will consider approaches to communicate the value of FUTURE products beyond the natural science community. Potential topics of additional discussion include outreach to other disciplines (e.g., psychologists and anthropologists) with the intent of developing more insightful and applicable inter-disciplinary outputs and strategies for presenting FUTURE products to the broader, international stakeholder community.
From this workshop, we plan a primary publication outlining how FUTURE products can be effectively communicated to the intended audiences.
Climate variability and climate change interact with other pressures to affect the productivity and dynamics of marine ecosystems. Managers charged with the stewardship of sustainable living marine resources are challenged to deal with consequences of this variability, and better tools are needed to inform them. Process-oriented research on climate-driven changes in ecosystem dynamics is occurring at the same time that new ecosystem-related tactics to manage species interactions (time/area restrictions-marine spatial planning) and maximum retention allowances (bycatch restrictions) are being explored. These new management tactics, if applied broadly, suggest that international agreements regarding straddling and shared fish stocks and highly migratory species need to be re-visited.
This workshop is hosted by the ICES-PICES Strategic Initiative (Section) on the Impacts of Climate Change on Marine Ecosystems (SICCME) to discuss state-of-the-art tools for: (1) calculating biological reference points under changing climate conditions that recognize that equilibrium states no longer apply; (2) assessing the relative ecological and economic costs and tradeoffs of different ecosystem-based management scenarios, and (3) estimating the vulnerability and stability of ecosystems (and their key components) required to make informed, ecosystem-based fisheries management.
The workshop is intended to provide a critical review of modelling tools available for fisheries management needs and to understand what advancements are required to address climate-driven changes in ecosystem dynamics. These goals will be facilitated by inviting fisheries managers as well as members of the ICES Working Group on Integrative, Physical-biological and Ecosystem Modelling (WGIPEM) and PICES modelling expert groups. All issues will be discussed in light of the upcoming release of IPCC's synthesis of impacts on marine ecosystems. A “Dahlem-type” format will require the convenors to pre-define workshop questions and direct participants to background reading material. After a morning of selected short presentations on management needs and modelling tools, break-out groups will discuss a set of pre-determined questions. A plenary discussion will synthesize group discussions leading to the next steps required to deliver specific outputs (one or more review papers to be published in a peer-reviewed journal).
W4: Ecosystem projection model inter-comparison and assessment of climate change impacts on global fish and fisheries
Convenors:
Anne Hollowed (USA)
Kirstin Holsman (USA)
Kerim Aydin (USA)
This workshop will assemble an international team of modeling experts in order to: (1) identify the optimal means of combining global earth system models (ESMs), high resolution regional modeling frameworks, and ecosystem models of varying complexity to provide robust assessments of climate-change impacts on marine ecosystems and fisheries, and (2) coordinate international efforts to assess biological and societal impacts of climate-driven changes to future marine resources.
These experts will discuss the options for interfacing fisheries and ecosystem models with next generation of ESMs. Discussion topics will include: 1) identification of candidate ESMs for use in regional models based on a common set of the most recent IPCC projections, 2) quality and spatial resolution of phytoplankton and zooplankton output from ESMs; 3) identification of which marine ecosystems require dynamic downscaling to address regional ocean processes; and 4) strengths and weakness of simplifying assumptions for higher trophic level projection. Following the workshop, participants will conduct paired simulations using agreed upon climate scenarios and model structures to project climate-driven changes to marine ecosystems. Results will be presented and analyzed at the 3rd PICES/ICES/IOC Symposium on “Effects of climate change on the world’s oceans†to be held in March 2015, in Santos, Brazil.
