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PATTERNS OF RISK TO BIVALVES AND THE SERVICES THEY PROVIDE ALONG THE WEST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA
Citation:
Folger, C., H. Lee II, B. Reusser, R. Graham, AND C. DeLong. PATTERNS OF RISK TO BIVALVES AND THE SERVICES THEY PROVIDE ALONG THE WEST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA. Aquatic Sciences Meeting (ASLO), San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 23 - March 02, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
For management to respond in a scientifically-sound fashion to climate change and mitigate its effects on commercial important bivalves, it is critical to have a basic knowledge of what bivalve species and ecoregions are at the greatest risk and what climate stressors are the “biggest problem”. Our approach is to base predictions on species' natural history traits (e.g., shell composition, habitat depth, etc.) and the climate modeling projections for the ecoregion that they occupy. This 'trait-based' approach allows us to predict relative climate vulnerabilities from species’ sensitivities and potential exposures.
Description:
Bivalves provide valuable ecosystem services. Services such as aquaculture, commercial harvesting and recreational/subsistence provisioning are the economic driver for many coastal communities. Shellfish also improve water quality, create habitat, recycle nutrients, buffer shorelines and facilitate sedimentation. As primary consumers, bivalves are ecosystem engineers and anchor the base of many marine food webs. Water with a lower pH has proven to be corrosive to early life stages of calcareous marine organisms such as bivalves. Increased ocean temperature also has deleterious developmental effects on multiple shellfish species. As such environmental trends intensify, what changes can we expect for bivalve ecosystem services and the final goods they produce? Using a web-based ecoinformatics tool, the Coastal Biodiversity Risk Analysis Tool (CBRAT) we rank the total number and percent of bivalve species that are grown/harvested from the Arctic to Southern California at an ecoregion scale. Model projections for ocean acidification, ocean temperatures and sea level rise are synthesized with individual species’ traits to predict a species’ risk to climate stressors. We present geographic patterns of bivalve use (aquaculture, wild harvest or recreational/subsistence) along with identifying which stressors is driving the risk in each ecoregion. Preliminary results, suggest that ocean acidification is the greatest threat to bivalves, with 94 - 100% of bivalve species at either high or moderate risk in all ten ecoregions by 2100. Temperature and sea level rise become more important in projections for the Southern ecoregions.