Global change will impact environmental drivers in marine ecosystems and consequently the spatial ecology of marine organisms, affecting their resilience to disturbance and stressors. Shifts in species distributions, phenology and life history pattern re-alignment, changing predator-prey and competitive interactions, and metapopulation connectivity are all examples of ecological changes expected to occur.
As such, impacts of change on the spatial ecology of marine fishes will affect population productivity, stability, and ultimately optimal levels of harvesting. Fisheries management must be proactive in understanding these spatial processes and integrating them into management objectives to achieve socio-ecological sustainability in times of change. This session is motivated by the belief that a mechanistic understanding of movement ecology - the causes and consequences of animal movement and space use - needs to be integrated into ecosystem-based fisheries management.
Spatial ecology impacts both productivity and vulnerability, so the session is built around these concepts. Researchers studying mechanistic linkages between environmental drivers and consequent effects on spatial patterns in recruitment, nursery habitat productivity, adult migrations, spawning patterns and site fidelity are invited as well as those studying the spatial ecology of fishers and other resource users.
We invite contributions on a range of topics relevant to integrating movement ecology into ecosystem-based management:
Drivers and consequences of individual movements strategies
Spawning site selection and migrations
Larval dispersal and nursery habitat
Spatial overlap and trophic dynamics
Connectivity between areas and life stages
Networking to build the capacity needed for movement ecology studies at the large marine ecosystem scale
Spatially implicit or explicit models for animal movement
Spatially explicit ecosystem-based models and stock assessments
Ways to integrate movement into resilience/vulnerability indicators
Communicating the relevance of movement ecology to managers and stakeholders
One aim is to publish a special issue in the ICES journal of Marine Science, highlighting mechanistic linkages between, scale, environmental drivers, marine movement ecology, and fisheries management.
