Ecopath International Initiative

Upon the rise in the intensity, duration and frequency of extreme events threatening life on Earth across land and ocean, there is a need to select ecologically significant areas for targeted management interventions. This study assesses the spatial overlap of multiple extreme events and calculates the cumulative magnitude faced across the Southern Hemisphere during the last decades, focusing on the 18 species of penguins as ecosystem sentinels that rely on terrestrial and marine environments. Our analysis identifies African, Snares, Emperor, Adélie and Galápagos as the penguin species experiencing the highest cumulative values of extreme events. Additionally, when looking at the trends, we identify that all penguin species, except the Galápagos penguin, will face a potential increase in extreme events if current trends are maintained. This study carries a crucial message in conservation, establishing a spatial framework that allows sounding the alert in ecologically important areas to reduce vulnerability during present and future extreme events.

Abstract Syphilis has re-emerged as a significant public health concern in the United States, with reported cases rising steadily since 2018 and reaching levels not observed since the pre-antibiotic era. Despite growing awareness among healthcare providers and public health agencies, comprehensive epidemiological analyses of the populations most affected remain limited. This retrospective descriptive study analyzed national syphilis surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 2018 and 2022. Trends in syphilis incidence were evaluated across key demographic and behavioral variables, including race and ethnicity, geographic region, sex of sexual partner, and substance use behaviors. Findings reveal persistent and widening disparities, with disproportionate increases in syphilis rates among racial and ethnic minority populations, individuals reporting substance use, and across diverse geographic regions. These results underscore the urgent need for targeted, equity-focused public health interventions and evidence-based policy responses to mitigate the ongoing syphilis epidemic in the United States.

Abstract Climate change could irreversibly modify Southern Ocean ecosystems. Marine ecosystem model (MEM) ensembles can assist policy making by projecting future changes and allowing the evaluation and assessment of alternative management approaches. However, projected changes in total consumer biomass from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP) global MEM ensemble highlight an uncertain future for the Southern Ocean, indicating the need for a region‐specific ensemble. A large source of model uncertainty originates from the Earth system models used to force FishMIP models, particularly future changes to lower trophic level biomass and sea‐ice coverage. To build confidence in regional MEMs as ecosystem‐based management tools in a changing climate that can better account for uncertainty, we propose the development of a Southern Ocean Marine Ecosystem Model Ensemble (SOMEME) contributing to the FishMIP 2.0 regional model intercomparison initiative. One of the challenges hampering progress of regional MEM ensembles is achieving the balance of global standardised inputs with regional relevance. As a first step, we design a SOMEME simulation protocol, that builds on and extends the existing FishMIP framework, in stages that include: detailed skill assessment of climate forcing variables for Southern Ocean regions, extension of fishing forcing data to include whaling, and new simulations that assess ecological links to sea‐ice processes in an ensemble of candidate regional MEMs. These extensions will help advance assessments of urgently needed climate change impacts on Southern Ocean ecosystems.

Abstract Climate change is affecting ocean temperature, acidity, currents, and primary production, causing shifts in species distributions, marine ecosystems, and ultimately fisheries. Earth system models simulate climate change impacts on physical and biogeochemical properties of future oceans under varying emissions scenarios. Coupling these simulations with an ensemble of global marine ecosystem models has indicated broad decreases of fish biomass with warming. However, regional details of these impacts remain much more uncertain. Here, we employ CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate change impact projections using two Earth system models coupled with four regional and nine global marine ecosystem models in 10 ocean regions to evaluate model agreement at regional scales. We find that models developed at different scales can lead to stark differences in biomass projections. On average, global models projected greater biomass declines by the end of the 21st century than regional models. For both global and regional models, greater biomass declines were projected using CMIP6 than CMIP5 simulations. Global models projected biomass declines in 86% of CMIP5 simulations for ocean regions compared to 50% for regional models in the same ocean regions. In CMIP6 simulations, all global model simulations projected biomass declines in ocean regions by 2100, while regional models projected biomass declines in 67% of the ocean region simulations. Our analysis suggests that improved understanding of the causes of differences between global and regional marine ecosystem model climate change projections is needed, alongside observational evaluation of modeled responses.

Abstract As the urgency to evaluate the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems increases, there is a need to develop robust projections and improve the uptake of ecosystem model outputs in policy and planning. Standardizing input and output data is a crucial step in evaluating and communicating results, but can be challenging when using models with diverse structures, assumptions, and outputs that address region‐specific issues. We developed an implementation framework and workflow to standardize the climate and fishing forcings used by regional models contributing to the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP) and to facilitate comparative analyses across models and a wide range of regions, in line with the FishMIP 3a protocol. We applied our workflow to three case study areas‐models: the Baltic Sea Mizer, Hawai'i‐based Longline fisheries therMizer, and the southern Benguela ecosystem Atlantis marine ecosystem models. We then selected the most challenging steps of the workflow and illustrated their implementation in different model types and regions. Our workflow is adaptable across a wide range of regional models, from non‐spatially explicit to spatially explicit and fully‐depth resolved models and models that include one or several fishing fleets. This workflow will facilitate the development of regional marine ecosystem model ensembles and enhance future research on marine ecosystem model development and applications, model evaluation and benchmarking, and global‐to‐regional model comparisons.

Climate warming generally induces poleward range expansions and equatorward range contractions of species’ environmental niches on a global scale. Here, we examined the direction and magnitude of species biomass centroid geographic shifts in relation to temperature and depth for 83 fish species in 9,522 standardised research trawls from the North Sea (1998–2020) to the Norwegian (2000–2020) and Barents Sea (2004–2020). We detected an overall significant northward shift of the marine fish community biomass in the North Sea, and individual species northward shifts in the Barents and North Seas, in 20% and 25% of the species’ biomass centroids in each respective region. We did not detect overall community shifts in the Norwegian Sea, where two species (8%) shifted in each direction (northwards and southwards). Among 9 biological traits, species biogeographic assignation, preferred temperature, age at maturity and maximum depth were significant explanatory variables for species latitudinal shifts in some of the study areas, and Arctic species shifted significantly faster than boreal species in the Barents Sea. Overall, our results suggest a strong influence of other factors, such as biological interactions, in determining several species’ recent geographic shifts.