Understanding and sustainably managing complex environments such as marine ecosystems benefits from an integrated approach to ensure that information about all relevant components and their interactions at multiple and nested spatiotemporal scales are considered. This information is based on a wide range of ocean observations using different systems and approaches. An integrated approach thus requires effective collaboration between areas of expertise in order to improve coordination at each step of the ocean observing value chain, from the design and deployment of multi-platform observations to their analysis and the delivery of products, sometimes through data assimilation in numerical models. Despite significant advances over the last two decades in more cooperation across the ocean observing activities, this integrated approach has not yet been fully realized. The ocean observing system still suffers from organizational silos due to independent and often disconnected initiatives, the strong and sometimes destructive competition across disciplines and among scientists, and the absence of a well-established overall governance framework. Here, we address the need for enhanced organizational integration among all the actors of ocean observing, focusing on the occidental systems. We advocate for a major evolution in the way we collaborate, calling for transformative scientific, cultural, behavioral, and management changes. This is timely because we now have the scientific and technical capabilities as well as urgent societal and political drivers. The ambition of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) and the various efforts to grow a sustainable ocean economy and effective ocean protection efforts all require a more integrated approach to ocean observing. After analyzing the barriers that currently prevent this full integration within the occidental systems, we suggest nine approaches for breaking down the silos and promoting better coordination and sharing. These recommendations are related to the organizational framework, the ocean science culture, the system of recognition and rewards, the data management system, the ocean governance structure, and the ocean observing drivers and funding. These reflections are intended to provide food for thought for further dialogue between all parties involved and trigger concrete actions to foster a real transformational change in ocean observing.

Many fisheries and marine science organizations are working to determine how to meet their missions in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. As such, it seems prudent to exchange ideas, share knowledge, and initiate a discussion among us. As the scientific leadership team for NOAA Fisheries, we wanted to offer some perspectives. Others are also evaluating the impacts of COVID-19 but from the perspective of addressing tactical, day-to-day concerns of restarting operations for various marine and fisheries-oriented organizations. Thus, it seemed appropriate to us to explore the potential challenges posed by COVID-19 and to purposefully ascertain whether there are strategic opportunities for improving how we conduct our operations. We need to find ways to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on our mission and also to glean information from our responses while in the midst of the crisis. We offer some recommendations to that end and offer these thoughts not as having solved every problem, but to learn from each other, compare across organizations, and engage in dialogue within our discipline to advance much-needed changes.

A 50-year-long (1958-2008) historical simulation of a climate-to-fish ecosystem model for anchovy (Eugralis encrasicolus) and sardine (Sardina pilchardus) populations in the upwelling ecosystem off NW Africa is revisited and analyzed. Anchovy and sardine annual adult abundances were correlated at interannual and decadal time scales in the historical run. A three-step analysis method applied unraveled the environmental and life stage-specific drivers underlying the bottom-up mechanisms responsible for the simulated variability in anchovy and sardine populations. Changes in anchovy adult abundance were primarily controlled by larval survival, prey availability, and local upwelling strength, whereas sardine adult abundance was controlled by age-1 growth affecting age-2 fecundity and egg production via prey availability. Despite different diet preferences, the common sensitivity of anchovy and sardine to prey availability had a synchronizing effect on the two populations, with both anchovy and sardine doing better during years of higher plankton biomass and colder ocean temperatures. Analysis of potential links with modes of climate variability showed that anchovy dynamics were more tightly connected to the AMO while sardine dynamics were correlated to the NAO. This difference stemmed from the vulnerability of the anchovy population to enhanced coastal upwelling causing increased larval drift mortality. Finally, based on an earlier, similar modeling study for the Californian anchovy and Pacific sardine, we argue that the relatively warmer habitat off NW Africa compared to the coastal region off central California is a key feature explaining synchronous populations in the Canary Current versus out-of-phase anchovy and sardine cycles in the California Current.

First posted August 4, 2020 For additional information, contact: Director, Southwest Biological Science CenterU.S. Geological Survey2255 N. Gemini DriveFlagstaff, AZ 86001Contact Pubs Warehouse Natural resource managers are coping with rapid changes in both environmental conditions and ecosystems. Enabled by recent advances in data collection and assimilation, short-term ecological forecasting may be a powerful tool to help resource managers anticipate impending near-term changes in ecosystem conditions or dynamics. Managers may use the information in forecasts to minimize the adverse effects of ecological stressors and optimize the effectiveness of management actions. To explore the potential for ecological forecasting to enhance natural resource management, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) convened a workshop titled "Building Capacity for Applied Short-Term Ecological Forecasting" on May 29—31, 2019, with participants from several Federal agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as all mission areas within the USGS.Participants broadly agreed that short-term ecological forecasting—on the order of days to years into the future—has tremendous potential to improve the quality and timeliness of information available to guide resource management decisions. Participants considered how ecological forecasting could directly affect their agency missions and specified numerous critical tools for addressing natural resource management concerns in the 21st century that could be enhanced by ecological forecasting. Given this breadth of possible applications for forecast products, participants developed a repeatable framework for evaluating potential value of a forecast product for enhancing resource management. Applying that process to a large list of forecast ideas that were developed in a brainstorming session, participants identified a small set of promising forecast products that illustrate the value of ecological forecasting for informing resource management. Workshop outcomes also include insights about important likely obstacles and next steps. In particular, reliable production and delivery of operational ecological forecasts will require a sustained commitment by research agencies, in partnership with resource management agencies, to maintain and improve forecasting tools and capabilities.

Starting in 2011, coastal areas of the Caribbean Sea and tropical Atlantic Ocean began to experience extraordinary yearly accumulations of pelagic Sargasswn brown alga. Historical reports place large quantities of Scagassum only in the North Atlantic (mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and the Sargasso Sea). Accumulations of Sargassum in the tropical Atlantic have continued. We used a numerical particle-tracking system, wind and current reanalysis data, drifting buoy trajectories, and satellite imagery to determine the origin of the Sargasswn that is now found persistently in the tropical Atlantic. Our analyses suggest that during the extreme negative phase of the winter 2009-2010 North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), unusually strong and southward-shifted westerly winds explain the transport of Scogassunt from the Sargasso Sea (similar to 20-40 degrees N, 80-20 degrees W) into the far eastern North Atlantic. Our hindcast Sargasswn distributions agree with surface current simulations with the inclusion of "windage". Windage is the additional, wind-induced drift of material floating at the free surface resulting from direct wind forcing on the sea surface, as well as on floating or partially-submerged objects. In our simulations, windage is included as an added vector (speed and direction) to the model-computed surface ocean currents equivalent to 1% of surface wind velocities. Lagrangian analysis of the regional circulation suggests that (1) part of the Sargassum subsequently drifted to the southwest in the North Equatorial Current (NEC) and entered the central tropical Atlantic, arriving in the Caribbean by the spring of 2011, with (2) another portion continuing southward along the coast of Africa hi the Canary Current, eventually joining the seasonally-varying system of tropical Atlantic currents and thereby delivering a large Sargassum population to the tropical Atlantic. Since then, Sargassum patches aggregate from March to September in massive windrows along the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) under the action of converging winds. The windrows follow the ITCZ in its seasonal northward migration in the central tropical Atlantic. They are stretched across the central tropical Atlantic as the ITCZ crosses the latitude of the seasonal formation of the North Equatorial Counter Current (NECC). These patches and windrows are exposed to high sunlight and open-ocean upward flux of nutrients due to eddy and wind-driven mixing in the central tropical Atlantic. During the northern spring and summer, as the Sargassum drifts farther north with the ITCZ, large portions of the population are advected into the eastern Caribbean Sea. Some of these patches remain dispersed as the ITCZ migrates southward, and re-aggregate into new windrows as the ITCZ intensifies the following March-April. If wind mixing is strong and the mixed layer is deeper than about 50-60 m in the southern tropical Atlantic at this time, the Sargasswn will bloom and form a massive windrow. Otherwise, the bloom will be inhibited. The extreme 2009-2010 NAO wind anomaly could be considered as triggering a biosphere "tipping point" that caused important ocean-scale ecosystem changes in the tropical Atlantic, with significant recurrent social and economic consequences. Understanding whether this new expanded geographic range of massive Sargassum blooms is temporary or whether it will revert to its pre-2009 distribution requires sustained monitoring and research.

Interdisciplinary research and collaborations are essential to disentangle complex and wicked global socio-ecological challenges. However, institutional structures and practices to support interdisciplinary research are still developing and a shared understanding on how best to develop effective interdisciplinary researchers (particularly at early career stages) is lacking. Barriers to interdisciplinary approaches, which include diverse disciplinary ‘languages’, research time constraints and limited guidance on how to achieve interdisciplinarity in practice, further challenge this understanding. To help overcome these barriers, this paper provides practical advice for early career researchers and their mentors, as well as senior researchers and lab leaders, in the form of 10 tips: ‘Develop an area of expertise’; ‘Learn new languages’; ‘Be open-minded’; ‘Be patient’; ‘Embrace complexity’; ‘Collaborate widely; ‘Push your boundaries’; ‘Consider if you will engage in interdisciplinary research’; ‘Foster interdisciplinary culture’; and ‘Champion interdisciplinary researchers’. They are presented here to empower present and future generations of interdisciplinary researchers in their endeavour to solve contemporary socio-ecological challenges worldwide.

Given the importance of wave–current interaction in estuarine and coastal dynamics, it is crucial to revisit impacts of surface gravity waves on three-dimensional (3D) nearshore circulation. This work investigates wave-induced circulation in three typical coastal systems including an idealized inlet and planar and natural barred beaches, by implementing the recent 3D radiation stress (RS) theory and vortex-force (VF) formalism to an unstructured-grid Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM). In the idealized inlet case, 3D RS generated appreciable currents near barriers and lateral boundaries while VF forced strong flows via breaking and roller-induced accelerations in front of the inlet. Both simulations indicate vertically varying wave-induced circulation that decreases markedly. In the planar beach with obliquely incident waves, both methods successfully produced surface onshore and bottom undertow, as well as the wave breaking and roller-induced longshore currents. Nevertheless, 3D RS generated unrealistic offshore currents close to the shoreline. The coupled models were validated against observations in the natural barred beach, and results indicate that the 3D RS model agrees slightly better with the observed longshore currents while 3D VF captures the vertical shear of the onshore–offshore flows reasonably. Further investigations suggest that both methods produce the wave breaking-induced surface onshore and bottom undertow successfully, yet they are located further offshore resulting from the 3D RS-induced unrealistic offshore currents. Successful implementations of the paired wave–current theories to the unstructured model would be fundamental and beneficial to the coastal ocean modeling community.

© 2018 American Meteorological Society. For information regarding reuse of this content and general copyright information, consult the AMS Copyright Policy (www.ametsoc.org/PUBSReuseLicenses).

Sardine and anchovy can exhibit dramatic decadal-scale shifts in abundance in response to climate variability. Sharpe declines of these populations entail particularly serious commercial and ecological consequences in eastern boundary current ecosystems, where they sustain major world fisheries and provide the forage for a broad variety of predators. Understanding the mechanisms and environmental forcing that drive the observed fish variability remains a challenging problem. The modelling study presented here provides an approach that bridges a comprehensive database with an end-to-end modelling framework enabling the investigation of the sources of variability of sardine and anchovy in the Canary Current System. Different biological traits and behaviour prescribed for sardine and anchovy gave rise to different distribution and displacements of the populations, but to a rather synchronous variability in terms of abundance and biomass, in qualitative agreement with historical landing records. Analysis of years with anomalously high increase and decline of the adult population points to food availability (instead of temperature or other environmental drivers) as the main environmental factor determining recruitment for both sardine (via spawning and survival of feeding age-0 individuals) and anchovy (via survival of feeding age-0). Consistent with this, the two species thrive under enhanced upwelling-favourable winds, but only up to some threshold of the wind velocity beyond which larval drift mortality exceeds the positive effect of the extra food supply. Based on the analysis of the simulation, we found that anchovy larvae

Small pelagic fish (SPF) species are heavily exploited in eastern boundary upwelling systems (EBUS) as their transformation products are increasingly used in the world's food chain. Management relies on regular monitoring, but there is a lack of robust theories for the emergence of the populations' traits and their evolution in highly variable environments. This work aims to address existing knowledge gaps by combining physical and biogeochemical modelling with an individual life-cycle based model applied to round sardinella (Sardinella aurita) off northwest Africa, a key species for regional food security. Our approach focused on the processes responsible for seasonal migrations, spatio-temporal size-structure, and interannual biomass fluctuations. Emergence of preferred habitat resulted from interactions between natal homing behavior and environmental variability that impacts early life stages. Exploration of the environment by the fishes was determined by swimming capabilities, mesoscale to regional habitat structure, and horizontal currents. Fish spatio-temporal abundance variability emerged from a complex combination of distinct life-history traits. An alongshore gradient in fish size distributions is reported and validated by in situ measurements. New insights into population structure are provided, within an area where the species is abundant year-round (Mauritania) and with latitudinal migrations of variable (300-1200 km) amplitude. Interannual biomass fluctuations were linked to modulations of fish recruitment over the Sahara Bank driven by variability in alongshore current intensity. The identified processes constitute an analytical framework that can be implemented in other EBUS and used to explore impacts of regional climate change on SPF.

Introduction. Recent record high sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTa) in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME; Fig. 6.1a) produced dramatic impacts on marine life (Cavole et al. 2016; Peterson et al. 2016; Welch 2016). While effects on many species and fisheries may have been short-lived, salmon fisheries, for example, were heavily impacted in 2016 due to multiyear persistence of unfavorable conditions. Negative impacts on CCLME salmon fisheries are likely to persist until at least 2019, as poor stream and 2014–16 ocean conditions directly influence the 2016–19 Chinook salmon abundance. U.S. West Coast Chinook salmon catches in 2016 were approximately 52% of the average catch since 2006, quotas for Chinook salmon fisheries were not met, and spawning escapements to the Klamath and Sacramento River basins were very low (PFMC 2017a). For 2017, the Klamath River Chinook salmon abundance forecast is the lowest on record, and salmon fishing has been sharply restricted from southern Oregon to southern California (PFMC 2017b). Our analysis focuses on the climatic drivers of the 2014–16 CCLME warm period and its extremity in the context of the past century. This study is motivated by an important question from a fisheries management perspective: to what extent were the 2014–16 extremes due to natural variability versus anthropogenic climate change?

The North Pacific eastern boundary upwelling system is one of the most ecologically productive, economically relevant, and well-studied systems in the world. Over the last 60 years, a wide range of observations have documented the significant impacts of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on marine ecosystems along the US West Coast. Yet there has been no systematic attempt to use this knowledge to explicitly forecast local marine ecosystem responses to individual ENSO events.

Recent developments in global dynamical climate prediction systems have allowed for skillful predictions of climate variables relevant to living marine resources (LMRs) at a scale useful to understanding and managing LMRs. Such predictions present opportunities for improved LMR management and industry operations, as well as new research avenues in fisheries science. LMRs respond to climate variability via changes in physiology and behavior. For species and systems where climate-fisheries links are well established, forecasted LMR responses can lead to anticipatory and more effective decisions, benefitting both managers and stakeholders. Here, we provide an overview of climate prediction systems and advances in seasonal to decadal prediction of marine-resource relevant environmental variables. We then describe a range of climate-sensitive LMR decisions that can be taken at lead-times of months to decades, before highlighting a range of pioneering case studies using climate predictions to inform LMR decisions. The success of these case studies suggests that many additional applications are possible. Progress, however, is limited by observational and modeling challenges. Priority developments include strengthening of the mechanistic linkages between climate and marine resource responses, development of LMR models able to explicitly represent such responses, integration of climate driven LMR dynamics in the multi-driver context within which marine resources exist, and improved prediction of ecosystem relevant variables at the fine regional scales at which most marine resource decisions are made. While there are fundamental limits to predictability, continued advances in these areas have considerable potential to make LMR managers and industry decision more resilient to climate variability and help sustain valuable resources. Concerted dialog between scientists, LMR managers and industry is essential to realizing this potential. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Universidad de Malaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional del Mar CEIMAR. Campus de Excelencia Andalucia Tech

The Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) project, formerly the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER1) project, is a global environmental change research initiative. Since its start in 2005, IMBeR has advanced understanding about potential marine environmental effects of global change, and the impacts and linkages to human systems at multiple scales. It is apparent that complex environmental issues and associated societal/sustainability choices operate at and across the interfaces of natural and social sciences and the humanities, and require both basic, curiosity-driven research and problem-driven, policy-relevant research. Collaborative, disciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and integrated research that addresses key ocean science issues generated by and/or impacting society is required to provide evidence-based knowledge and guidance, along with options for policy-makers, managers and marine-related communities, to help achieve sustainability of the marine realm under global change. This recognition underlies a new vision, “Ocean sustainability under global change for the benefit of society”, to guide IMBeR research for the next decade (2016-2025). This vision recognises that the evolution of marine ecosystems (including biogeochemical cycles and human systems) is linked to natural and anthropogenic drivers and stressors, as articulated in the new IMBeR research goal to, “Understand, quantify and compare historic and present structure and functioning of linked ocean and human systems to predict and project changes including developing scenarios and options for securing or transitioning towards ocean sustainability”. To implement its new vision and goal in the next decade, IMBeR’s mission is to, “Promote integrated marine research and enable capabilities for developing and implementing ocean sustainability options within and across the natural and social sciences, and communicate relevant information and knowledge needed by society to secure sustainable, productive and healthy oceans”. This Science Plan and Implementation Strategy provides a 10-year (2016-2025) marine research agenda for IMBeR. It is developed around three Grand Challenges (GC, see Graphical Executive Summary) focusing on climate variability, global change and drivers and stressors. The qualitative and quantitative understanding of historic and present ocean variability and change (Grand Challenge I) are the basis for scenarios, projections and predictions of the future (Grand Challenge II). These are linked in Grand Challenge III to understand how humans are causing the variability and changes, and how they, in turn, are impacted by these changes, including feedbacks between the human and ocean systems. Priority research areas with overarching and specific research questions are identified for each Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenges are supplemented with Innovation Challenges (IC, see graphical executive summary) that focus on new topics for IMBeR where research is needed and where it is believed that major achievements can be made within three to five years. The Innovation Challenges also provide a means for IMBeR to adjust its focus as major science discoveries are made and new priorities arise, especially regarding scientific innovations.

The advent of an ecosystem-based approach dramatically expanded the scope of fisheries management, creating a critical need for new kinds of data and quantitative approaches that could be integrated into the management system. Ecosystem models are needed to codify the relationships among drivers, pressures and resulting states, and to quantify the trade-offs between conflicting objectives. Incorporating ecosystem considerations requires moving from the single-species models used in stock assessments, to more complex models that include species interactions, environmental drivers and human consequences. With this increasing model complexity, model fit can improve, but parameter uncertainty increases. At intermediate levels of complexity, there is a sweet spot' at which the uncertainty in policy indicators is at a minimum. Finding the sweet spot in models requires compromises: for example, to include additional component species, the models of each species have in some cases been simplified from age-structured to logistic or bioenergetic models. In this paper, we illuminate the characteristics, capabilities and short-comings of the various modelling approaches being proposed for ecosystem-based fisheries management. We identify key ecosystem needs in fisheries management and indicate which types of models can meet these needs. Ecosystem models have been playing strategic roles by providing an ecosystem context for single-species management decisions. However, conventional stock assessments are being increasingly challenged by changing natural mortality rates and environmentally driven changes in productivity that are observed in many fish stocks. Thus, there is a need for more tactical ecosystem models that can respond dynamically to changing ecological and environmental conditions.

Pacific herring populations at eight North Pacific Rim locations were simulated to compare basin-wide geographic variations in age-specific growth due to environmental influences on marine productivity and population-specific responses to regime shifts. Temperature and zooplankton abundance from a three-dimensional lower-trophic ecosystem model (NEMURO: North Pacific Ecosystem Model for Understanding Regional Oceanography) simulation from 1948 to 2002 were used as inputs to a herring bioenergetics growth model. Herring populations from California, the west coast of Vancouver Island (WCVI), Prince William Sound (PWS), Togiak Alaska, the western Bering Sea (WBS), the Sea of Okhotsk (SO), Sakhalin, and Peter the Great Bay (PGB) were examined. The half-saturation coefficients of herring feeding were calibrated to climatological conditions at each of the eight locations to reproduce averaged size-at-age data. The depth of averaging used for water temperature and zooplankton, and the maximum consumption rate parameter, were made specific to each location. Using the calibrated half-saturation coefficients, the 1948-2002 period was then simulated using daily values of water temperature and zooplankton densities interpolated from monthly model output. To detect regime shifts in simulated temperatures, zooplankton and herring growth rates, we applied sequential t-test analyses on the 54 years of hindcast simulation values. The detected shifts of herring age-5 growth showed closest match (69%) to the regime shift years (1957/58, 1970/71, 1976/77, 1988/89, 1998/99). We explored relationships among locations using cluster and principal component analyses. The first principal component of water temperature showed good correspondence to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and all zooplanIcton groups showed a pan-Pacific decrease after the 1976/77 regime shift. However, the first principal component of herring growth rate showed decreased growth at the SO, PWS, WCVI and California locations and increased growth at the Sakhalin, WBS and Togiak locations after 1977. The SO location belonged to the same cluster as the location in with the eastern North Pacific. The calibrated half-saturation coefficients affected the degree to which growth was sensitive to interannual variation in water temperature versus zooplankton. For example, the half-saturation values for the SO location resulted in very efficient feeding that shifted the sensitivity of herring growth from food to temperature. The model results demonstrate how geographic specificity of bioenergetics parameters, coupled with location-specific variation in temperature and food, can combine to determine local and regional responses of fish growth to climate forcing. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has emerged as a basic approach for managing human activities in marine ecosystems, with the aim of recovering and conserving marine ecosystems and the services they deliver. Integrated ecosystem assessments (IEAs) further the transition of EBM from principle to practice by providing an efficient, transparent means of summarizing the status of ecosystem components, screening and prioritizing potential risks, and evaluating alternative management strategies against a backdrop of environmental variability. In this paper, we draw upon lessons learned from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's IEA programme to outline steps required for IEA implementation. We provide an overview of the conceptual framework for IEAs, the practical constraints that shape the structure of individual IEAs, and the uses and outcomes of IEAs in support of EBM.