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Climatic Change (2012) 115:883891
DOI 10.1007/s10584-012-0599-x
LETTER
Malin L. Pinsky & Michael Fogarty
Received: 18 May 2012 /Accepted: 26 September 2012 /Published online: 6 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract While previous research has documented marine fish and invertebrates shifting poleward in response to warming climates, less is known about the response of fisheries to these changes. By examining fisheries in the northeastern United States over the last four decades of warming temperatures, we show that northward shifts in species distributions were matched by corresponding northward shifts in fisheries. The proportion of warm-water species caught in most states also increased through time. Most importantly, however, fisheries shifted only 1030 % as much as their target species, and evidence suggested that economic and regulatory constraints played important roles in creating these lags. These lags may lead to overfishing and population declines if not accounted for in fisheries management and climate adaptation. In coupled natural-human systems such as fisheries, human actions play important roles in determining the sustainability of the system and, therefore, future conservation and climate mitigation planning will need to consider not only biophysical changes, but also human responses to these changes and the feedbacks that these responses have on ecosystems.
1 Introduction
Some of the most important ecosystem services derived from the ocean are the seafood, employment, and support to local economies provided by marine fisheries. Substantial attention has focused on the impact that overfishing, habitat destruction, and other stressors have had on these services (Pauly et al. 2002; Worm et al. 2006), and on the value that can be gained by rebuilding overfished populations (Worm et al. 2009). Fisheries, however, also
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0599-x
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M. L. Pinsky (*)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, 106A Guyot Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, USAe-mail: pinsky@princeton.edu
M. Fogarty
Northeast Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA
Lagged social-ecological responses to climate and range shifts in fisheries
884 Climatic Change (2012) 115:883891
rely upon species and populations that are sensitive to climate change (Sumaila et al. 2011). Substantial evidence suggests that warming climates are already pushing marine fishes...