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Open AccessOperationalizing climate risk in a global warming hotspot
Climate change is a looming threat to marine life, creating an urgent need to develop climate-informed conservation strategies. The Climate Risk Index for Biodiversity was designed to assess the climate risk f...
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Article
Open AccessA database of mapped global fishing activity 1950–2017
A new database on historical country-level fishing fleet capacity and effort is described, derived from a range of publicly available sources that were harmonized, converted to fishing effort, and mapped to 30...
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A climate risk index for marine life
Climate change is impacting virtually all marine life. Adaptation strategies will require a robust understanding of the risks to species and ecosystems and how those propagate to human societies. We develop a ...
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Open AccessPotential impacts of climate change on agriculture and fisheries production in 72 tropical coastal communities
Climate change is expected to profoundly affect key food production sectors, including fisheries and agriculture. However, the potential impacts of climate change on these sectors are rarely considered jointly...
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Open AccessNext-generation ensemble projections reveal higher climate risks for marine ecosystems
Projections of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems have revealed long-term declines in global marine animal biomass and unevenly distributed impacts on fisheries. Here we apply an enhanced suite of glo...
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Open AccessNon-linear changes in modelled terrestrial ecosystems subjected to perturbations
Perturbed ecosystems may undergo rapid and non-linear changes, resulting in ‘regime shifts’ to an entirely different ecological state. The need to understand the extent, nature, magnitude and reversibility of ...
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Open AccessFuture ocean biomass losses may widen socioeconomic equity gaps
Future climate impacts and their consequences are increasingly being explored using multi-model ensembles that average across individual model projections. Here we develop a statistical framework that integrat...
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Open AccessState-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes
Global impact models represent process-level understanding of how natural and human systems may be affected by climate change. Their projections are used in integrated assessments of climate change. Here we te...
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Linked sustainability challenges and trade-offs among fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture
Fisheries and aquaculture make a crucial contribution to global food security, nutrition and livelihoods. However, the UN Sustainable Development Goals separate marine and terrestrial food production sectors a...
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Deep-sea diversity patterns are shaped by energy availability
Depth-dependent patterns in ocean species diversity can be explained by latitudinal variations in energy availability, with shelf and upper-slope diversity increasing with thermal energy availability, and deep...
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Ecosystem vulnerability to ocean warming
Analysis of the temperature ranges occupied by marine species finds that the vulnerability of ecological communities to global warming may depend more on organismal physiology than on the magnitude of change. See...
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Temperate hotspots
The inclusion of abundance data in global surveys of reef fishes reveals new hotspots of functional biodiversity, not all of which show high species richness. The findings may influence conservation priorities. S...
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Time to model all life on Earth
To help transform our understanding of the biosphere, ecologists — like climate scientists — should simulate whole ecosystems, argue Drew Purves and colleagues.
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Scorecard for the seas
An index assessing the health of the oceans gives a global score of 60 out of 100. But the idea that a single number can encompass both environmental status and the benefits that the oceans provide for humans ...
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Elevated species diversity in abyssal gastropods off Newfoundland: the potential role of food supply
We compare species diversity and composition in a large sample of deep-sea gastropods collected off Newfoundland and the Grand Banks (4,400 m) to samples from the continental rise (3,806-3,834 m) and abyssal p...
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Open AccessAcute effects of removing large fish from a near-pristine coral reef
Large animals are severely depleted in many ecosystems, yet we are only beginning to understand the ecological implications of their loss. To empirically measure the short-term effects of removing large animal...
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Global patterns and predictors of marine biodiversity across taxa
Building on the decade-long Census of Marine Life project, a new global analysis of data on the distribution of 11,567 marine species from 13 different taxonomic groups, including zooplankton, plants, inverteb...
