Tessellated calcified cartilage (TCC) is a distinctive kind of biomineralized perichondral tissue found in many modern and extinct chondrichthyans (sharks, rays, chimaeroids and their extinct allies). Customarily, this feature has been treated somewhat superficially in phylogenetic analyses, often as a single “defining” character of a chondrichthyan clade. TCC is actually a complex hard tissue with numerous distinctive attribu...

Climate change is shifting species’ distribution and phenology. Ecological traits, such as mobility or reproductive mode, explain variation in observed rates of shift for some taxa. However, estimates of relationships between traits and climate responses could be influenced by how responses are measured. We compiled a global data set of 651 published marine species’ responses to climate change, from 47 papers on distribution s...

Aim To assess confidence in conclusions about climate‐driven biological change through time, and identify approaches for strengthening confidence scientific conclusions about ecological impacts of climate change. Location Global. Methods We outlined a framework for strengthening confidence in inferences drawn from biological climate impact studies through the systematic integration of prior expectations, long‐term data and qua...

Regime shifts are sudden changes in ecosystem structure that can be detected across several ecosystem components. The concept that regime shifts are common in marine ecosystems has gained popularity in recent years. Many studies have searched for the step‐like changes in ecosystem state expected under a simple interpretation of this idea. However, other kinds of change, such as pervasive trends, have often been ignored. We ass...

Contemporary impacts of anthropogenic climate change on ecosystems are increasingly being recognized. Documenting the extent of these impacts requires quantitative tools for analyses of ecological observations to distinguish climate impacts in noisy data and to understand interactions between climate variability and other drivers of change. To assist the development of reliable statistical approaches, we review the marine clim...

A regime shift is a large, sudden, and long‐lasting change in the dynamics of an ecosystem, affecting multiple trophic levels. There are a growing number of papers that report regime shifts in marine ecosystems. However, the evidence for regime shifts is equivocal, because the methods used to detect them are not yet well developed. We have collated over 300 biological time series from seven marine regions around the UK, coveri...

The global ocean and atmosphere are warming. There is increasing evidence suggesting that, in addition to other environmental factors, climate change is affecting species distributions and local population dynamics. Additionally, as a consequence of the growing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), the oceans are taking up increasing amounts of this CO 2 , causing ocean pH to decrease (ocean acidification). The relativ...