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- OPEN ACCESSCoastal biogenic habitats are vulnerable to human impacts from both terrestrial and marine realms. Yet the broad spatial scale used in current approaches of quantifying anthropogenic stressors is not relevant to the finer scales affecting most coastal habitats. We developed a standardized human impact metric that includes five bay-scale and four local-scale (0–1 km) terrestrial and marine-based impacts to quantify the magnitude of anthropogenic impacts to coastal bays and nearshore biogenic habitats. We applied this metric to 180 seagrass beds (Zostera marina), an important biogenic habitat prioritized for marine protection, in 52 bays across Atlantic Canada. The results show that seagrass beds and coastal bays exist across a wide human impact gradient and provide insight into which are the most and least affected by human threats. Generally, land alteration, nutrient loading, and shellfish aquaculture were higher in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, whereas invasive species and fishing activities were higher along the Atlantic coast. Sixty-four percent of bays were at risk of seagrass decline from nitrogen loading. We also found high within-bay variation in impact intensity, emphasizing the necessity of quantifying impacts at multiple spatial scales. We discuss implications for management and conservation planning, and application to other coastal habitats in Canada and beyond.
- OPEN ACCESSCumulative human impact analysis is a promising management tool to estimate the impacts of stressors on ecosystems caused by multiple human activities. However, connecting cumulative impact scores to actual ecosystem change at appropriate spatial scales remains challenging. Here, we calculated cumulative effects (CE) scores for 187 seagrass beds in Atlantic Canada that accounts for both bay-scale and local-scale anthropogenic activities. We then developed a CE threshold to evaluate where degradation of seagrass beds from multiple human activities is more likely. Overall, the CE score was the best predictor of human impacts for seagrass beds. Locations with high watershed land alteration and nitrogen loading had the highest CE scores; however, we also identified seagrass beds with high CE scores in regions characterized by generally low levels of human activities. Forty-nine seagrass beds exceeded the CE threshold and, of these, 86% had CE scores that were influenced by three or more stressors that cumulatively amounted to a large score. This CE threshold approach can provide a simplified metric to identify areas where management of cumulative effects should be prioritized and further highlights the need to consider multiple human activities when assessing anthropogenic impacts to coastal habitats.
- OPEN ACCESS
- Heike K. Lotze,
- Stefanie Mellon,
- Jonathan Coyne,
- Matthew Betts,
- Meghan Burchell,
- Katja Fennel,
- Marisa A. Dusseault,
- Susanna D. Fuller,
- Eric Galbraith,
- Lina Garcia Suarez,
- Laura de Gelleke,
- Nina Golombek,
- Brianne Kelly,
- Sarah D. Kuehn,
- Eric Oliver,
- Megan MacKinnon,
- Wendy Muraoka,
- Ian T.G. Predham,
- Krysten Rutherford,
- Nancy Shackell,
- Owen Sherwood,
- Elizabeth C. Sibert, and
- Markus Kienast
The abundance, distribution, and size of marine species are linked to temperature and nutrient regimes and are profoundly affected by humans through exploitation and climate change. Yet little is known about long-term historical links between ocean environmental changes and resource abundance to provide context for current and potential future trends and inform conservation and management. We synthesize >4000 years of climate and marine ecosystem dynamics in a Northwest Atlantic region currently undergoing rapid changes, the Gulf of Maine and Scotian Shelf. This period spans the late Holocene cooling and recent warming and includes both Indigenous and European influence. We compare environmental records from instrumental, sedimentary, coral, and mollusk archives with ecological records from fossils, archaeological, historical, and modern data, and integrate future model projections of environmental and ecosystem changes. This multidisciplinary synthesis provides insight into multiple reference points and shifting baselines of environmental and ecosystem conditions, and projects a near-future departure from natural climate variability in 2028 for the Scotian Shelf and 2034 for the Gulf of Maine. Our work helps advancing integrative end-to-end modeling to improve the predictive capacity of ecosystem forecasts with climate change. Our results can be used to adjust marine conservation strategies and network planning and adapt ecosystem-based management with climate change. - OPEN ACCESS
- Andrea Bryndum-Buchholz,
- Julia L. Blanchard,
- Marta Coll,
- Hubert Du Pontavice,
- Jason D. Everett,
- Jerome Guiet,
- Ryan F. Heneghan,
- Olivier Maury,
- Camilla Novaglio,
- Juliano Palacios-Abrantes,
- Colleen M. Petrik,
- Derek P. Tittensor, and
- Heike K. Lotze
Climate change is altering marine ecosystems across the globe and is projected to do so for centuries to come. Marine conservation agencies can use short- and long-term projections of species-specific or ecosystem-level climate responses to inform marine conservation planning. Yet, integration of climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience into marine conservation planning is limited. We analysed future trajectories of climate change impacts on total consumer biomass and six key physical and biogeochemical drivers across the Northwest Atlantic Ocean to evaluate the consequences for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) in Atlantic Canada. We identified climate change hotspots and refugia, where the environmental drivers are projected to change most or remain close to their current state, respectively, by mid- and end-century. We used standardized outputs from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project and the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Our analysis revealed that, currently, no existing marine conservation areas in Atlantic Canada overlap with identified climate refugia. Most (75%) established MPAs and more than one-third (39%) of the established OECMs lie within cumulative climate hotspots. Our results provide important long-term context for adaptation and future-proofing spatial marine conservation planning in Canada and the Northwest Atlantic region.