Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The abundance, distribution, and size of fish species are intrinsically linked to changing ocean conditions such as water temperatures and nutrient regimes. They are also profoundly affected by human activities, most prominently fisheries exploitation. While historical accounts of the latter are taken into account in fisheries management, very little is known about the historical link between ocean environmental change and marine ecosystems in general, and fish communities in particular. This project will generate high resolution and quantitative reconstructions of ocean dynamics vis-à-vis fish abundances in the Northwest Atlantic ecosystem during the last 2,000 years, a time span covering both the pre-Colonial and post- European settlement world. Records of changing ocean environmental conditions derived from sedimentary, coral and mollusk records will be combined with records of variations in fish abundance, size, and community structure from both fish microfossils (ichthyoliths) preserved in the sedimentary record and from archaeological and historical data. These data sets will be compared with realistic coupled climate biogeochemistry-ecosystem-fishing hindcast models. This highly innovative approach of combining diverse time series will, for the first time, provide reference points on a shifting baseline for climate change adaptation policy and ecosystem management and will directly inform integrative models to improve predictive capacity of ecosystem forecasts under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected climate scenarios. Our results will be communicated to decision makers, such as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), and the public through outreach, education, and advocacy efforts in collaboration with our end-users, including DFO and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada. Our results will also be immediately applicable to fisheries and oceans management processes, including a move towards ecosystem-based fisheries management and broad scale spatial protections.