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Assessing Temperature Risk to Crab in the Northeast Pacific (Southern California to the Beaufort Sea)
Citation:
Folger, C., H. Lee, R. Graham, B. Reuesser, D. Reusser, Pat Clinton, AND C. Delong. Assessing Temperature Risk to Crab in the Northeast Pacific (Southern California to the Beaufort Sea). CERF, Providence, RI, November 06 - 09, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
This work was conducted under the Air Climate and Energy (ACE) Program Project 2 - Climate Impacts on Watersheds, Water Quality, and Ecosystems, Task 2.1: Assessing impacts of individual and multiple climate stressors on near-coastal species at a regional. This research focuses on predicting relative vulnerability of near-coastal crab species (Brachyura) to increases in sea surface temperature at a regional scale. The research also shows how risk varies geographically from Southern California to the Beaufort Sea. This results are preliminary, final results may be used by conservation groups and managers to develop regionally-specific conservation and adaption strategies. The data in this poster are generated from the Coastal Biodiversity Risk Assessment Tool (CBRAT; http://www.cbrat.org/), an online ecoinformatics platform developed by these authors.
Description:
To evaluate the vulnerability of the Brachyura crabs (<200 m) to projected increases in sea surface temperature (SST), we developed an approach that evaluates risk within each of the ten Marine Ecoregions of the World (MEOW) ranging from Southern California to the Beaufort Sea. The ecological thermal range of each species was estimated by determining the SST range around the mean temperature in the species’ warmest occupied ecoregion. Risk was then determined by comparing the projected sea surface temperature (historical + predicted increase) of each occupied ecoregion with the historical SST range of the warmest occupied ecoregion. All data was synthesized in the Coastal Biodiversity Risk Analysis Tool (CBRAT, www.cbrat.org), an on-line tool that assesses the impacts of climate stressors on near-coastal species at a regional scale. The crabs in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas appear to be at a low risk to temperature increases since the distributions of all these species extend into warmer ecoregions. In contrast, the greatest number of species at risk occurred in Southern California, the southern limit for many crab species. Of the 173 crab species occurring in U.S. Pacific waters, 68 (39%) are estimated to be at moderate or high risk to increases in SST in one or more ecoregion.