Comparative analysis European wide marine ecosystem shifts - a large scale approach for developing the basis for ecosystem-based management

Abrupt and rapid ecosystem shifts (where major reorganizations of food-web and community structures occur), commonly termed regime shifts, are changes between contrasting and persisting states of ecosystem structure and function. These shifts have been increasingly reported for exploited marine ecosystems around the world from the North Pacific to the North Atlantic. Understanding the drivers and mechanisms leading to marine ecosystem shifts is crucial in developing adaptive management strategies to achieve sustainable exploitation of marine ecosystems. An international workshop on a comparative approach to analysing these marine ecosystem shifts was held at Hamburg University, Institute for Hydrobiology and Fisheries Science, Germany on 1-3 November 2010. Twenty-seven scientists from 14 countries attended the meeting, representing specialists from seven marine regions, including the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Barents Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Bay of Biscay and the Scotian Shelf off the Canadian East coast. The goal of the workshop was to conduct the first large-scale comparison of marine ecosystem regime shifts across multiple regional areas, in order to support the development of ecosystem-based management strategies.

A tale of two seas: contrasting patterns of population structure in the small-spotted catshark across Europe.

Elasmobranchs represent important components of marine ecosystems, but they can be vulnerable to overexploitation. This has driven investigations into the population genetic structure of large-bodied pelagic sharks, but relatively little is known of population structure in smaller demersal taxa, which are perhaps more representative of the biodiversity of the group. This study explores spatial population genetic structure of the small-spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula), across European seas. The results show significant genetic differences among most of the Mediterranean sample collections, but no significant structure among Atlantic shelf areas. The data suggest the Mediterranean populations are likely to have persisted in a stable and structured environment during Pleistocene sea-level changes. Conversely, the Northeast Atlantic populations would have experienced major changes in habitat availability during glacial cycles, driving patterns of population reduction and expansion. The data also provide evidence of male-biased dispersal and female philopatry over large spatial scales, implying complex sex-determined differences in the behaviour of elasmobranchs. On the basis of this evidence, we suggest that patterns of connectivity are determined by trends of past habitat stability that provides opportunity for local adaptation in species exhibiting philopatric behaviour, implying that resilience of populations to fisheries and other stressors may differ across the range of species.

The assessment of a global marine ecosystem model on the basis of emergent properties and ecosystem function: a case study with ERSEM

Ecosystem models are often assessed using quantitative metrics of absolute ecosystem state, but these model-data comparisons are disproportionately vulnerable to discrepancies in the location of important circulation features. An alternative method is to demonstrate the models capacity to represent ecosystem function; the emergence of a coherent natural relationship in a simulation indicates that the model may have an appropriate representation of the ecosystem functions that lead to the emergent relationship. Furthermore, as emergent properties are large-scale properties of the system, model validation with emergent properties is possible even when there is very little or no appropriate data for the region under study, or when the hydrodynamic component of the model differs significantly from that observed in nature at the same location and time. A selection of published meta-analyses are used to establish the validity of a complex marine ecosystem model and to demonstrate the power of validation with emergent properties. These relationships include the phytoplankton community structure, the ratio of carbon to chlorophyll in phytoplankton and particulate organic matter, the ratio of particulate organic carbon to particulate organic nitrogen and the stoichiometric balance of the ecosystem. These metrics can also inform aspects of the marine ecosystem model not available from traditional quantitative and qualitative methods. For instance, these emergent properties can be used to validate the design decisions of the model, such as the range of phytoplankton functional types and their behaviour, the stoichiometric flexibility with regards to each nutrient, and the choice of fixed or variable carbon to nitrogen ratios.