Helping Species Thrive

The world’s oceans are becoming warmer and less oxygenated, but the impacts of these changes on marine organisms and ecosystem services, including seafood production, remain poorly understood. This proposal will test and develop a new metabolic approach that can be used to map the aerobic habitable range for marine organisms. Scientists, environmental and fisheries managers, fishers and aquaculture businesses will be able to use this approach to flexibly and accurately predict viable future ranges of individual species to guide management, monitoring and adaptive actions. Likewise, paleontologists and geologists can utilize the approach to understand the causes of ancient mass extinctions—our best analogs for future global change outside the timescale of human experience and instrumentation. Our project will focus on testing and demonstrating the utility of the metabolic index in species of high economic and ecologic importance in the California Current ecosystem (the purple sea urchin and red abalone), but ultimately the power of the approach is its flexibility: once validated, it can be applied to any species in any ocean to predict habitable ranges under different climate change scenarios.