Using computer modeling to simulate a future with and without marine reserves under climate change

As human — induced climate change influences the world’s oceans, protecting ocean resources has become ever more important.

Marine reserves are one strategy to protect fish and wildlife species and important habitats, and these reserves restrict human activities such as fishing and other resource extraction.

So far, we know that marine reserves are effective at increasing marine species abundances and biodiversity, but we don’t know how marine reserves will fare under future ocean changes such as increased temperatures.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Studies have suggested that as temperatures warm, certain species have shifted to the poles and toward deeper waters, for, fish can only live in a certain temperature pocket (based on the temperature of the water, how much oxygen that water can hold, and how much oxygen the fish needs).

As fish move out of their historical habitats with climate change, we need to understand how effective marine reserves will be.

To do this we used computer modeling to simulate a future with and without marine reserves.

In this future, marine fish will change locations as ocean temperatures warm, causing some marine reserves to lose more marine fish species than others.

In the end, the presence of marine reserves does lead to a world with less severe effects of climate change on marine populations than a world without them.

Read the paper — Incorporating protected areas into global fish biomass projections under climate change by Juliano Palacios-Abrantes, Sarah M. Roberts, Talya ten Brink, Tim Cashion, William W.L. Cheung, Anne Mook, and Tu Nguyen.