Integrating Climate and Ecosystems Science to Inform Marine Ecosystem Management
Abstract
Climate change has consistently been identified as a top threat to sensitive marine ecosystems such as coral reefs. However, such assessments are made largely by reference to coarse-scale global climate models and limited empirical research from single disciplines. This paper describes a NOAA-wide effort to bring together climatologists, ecologists, oceanographers, and ecosystem managers to identify critical climate-ecosystem connections, and to develop a suite of integrated information products that will improve an ecosystem manager's ability to identify potential climate impacts and variability at scales relevant to the ecosystems they manage. This Integrated Marine Protected Area Climate Tools (IMPACT) project references historical climatologies against ecological impacts to provide more relevant, quantified information to ecosystem stewards seeking to understand and plan for future environmental stresses.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFMGC51C0987S
- Keywords:
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- 0460 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Marine systems;
- 1630 GLOBAL CHANGE / Impacts of global change;
- 3305 ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES / Climate change and variability;
- 4215 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL / Climate and interannual variability