Abstract
Under future climate change, modification of temperature and salinity are expected to result in distribution shifts of marine organisms, including commercial fish and shellfish. Changes are anticipated everywhere, including in the seas of many important fishing nations. Species turnover will in turn result in both opportunities and threats to fishing industries. To determine the impacts for northwest European shelf fisheries, we project changes for 49 commercially important fish and shellfish species using an ensemble of five ecological niche models and three different downscaled climate change projections. The habitat suitability and latitudinal shifts projected from the recent past (1997–2016) to two futures (2030–2050; 2050–2070) were calculated for waters around the United Kingdom. Of the species examined, around half were projected to have consistently more suitable habitat in the future, including European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax, Moronidae), sardine (Sardina pilchardus, Alosidae) and anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus, Engraulidae). Conversely, it is suggested that UK waters will become less suitable for species including Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua, Gadidae) and saithe (Pollachius virens, Gadidae). Our comprehensive approach using a number of models and climate change scenarios shows that while there are differences in the magnitude of change between models, and while some models perform better for certain species compared with others, overall, the general trends in habitat suitability and abundance are robust across models and climate scenarios. This emphasises the value in using more than one modelling technique with different climate scenarios (i.e., an ensemble approach) to capture the uncertainty or agreement around climate change projections.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 848-862 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Fish and Fisheries |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Early online date | 2 Jul 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was funded under Defra project MF1114: Identify long‐term distribution shifts based on anticipated future climatic changes. Thanks to Francisco Velasco at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography who shared additional Spanish groundfish survey data. Jonathan Tinker was supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra. Production of the RCP climate projections was supported by the Climate Change and European Aquatic Resources (CERES) project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 678193.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Crown copyright and The Authors. Fish and Fisheries published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This article is published with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the King's Printer for Scotland.
