Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Marine ecosystems are undergoing novel and unprecedented changes due to climate change and other human-induced stressors. To generate effective conservation plans for safeguarding our marine future, scientists must first understand how a multitude of factors are coming together to impact marine ecosystems. This research program will apply contemporary inference frameworks to quantify how social and environmental factors are impacting imperilled marine systems, under three objectives: (1) community-engaged causal analysis of marine and coastal ecosystems, (2) assessing fisheries recovery through causal discovery and causal effect estimation, and (3) quantifying impacts of global marine change. Projects under objective 1 will represent the first set of research projects that will integrate community-engaged research with contemporary causal modelling to gain insight into local marine and coastal ecosystems. Here, interdisciplinary researchers and local community members (including youth, fishers, Indigenous knowledge holders, and conservation practitioners) will co-generate causal diagrams that integrate a plurality of ecological knowledge systems, which in turn will guide the development of causal models that uncover the mechanisms impacting local ecosystems. Projects under objective 2 will apply contemporary approaches in causal discovery (e.g., constraint-based, asymmetry-based, and score-based approaches) and causal effect estimation (e.g., structural causal model adapted to time-series data) on fisheries time-series data to help set conservation priorities that can rebuild recovering fisheries across Atlantic Canada. Projects under objective 3 will integrate causal inference frameworks with artificial intelligence and non-parametric statistical techniques to harness the full potential of big data in marine ecology, uncovering causal mechanisms that are driving marine changes at global scales. By centering causal inference in marine research, this program will cut across multiple processes, scales, and disciplines, providing a coherent framework for thinking about ecological complexity and generating informed marine conservation solutions. Ultimately, research arising from this program will accelerate the depth and pace at which we understand the underlying mechanisms driving marine ecosystem change, while simultaneously providing methodological advancements that every ecologist can apply to answer fundamental causal questions in nature.