Policies aiming to restore ecosystems, achieve thriving fisheries and reverse biodiversity loss require knowledge of their former status and long‐term variation. As quantitative fish data is typically only available for recent decades long after changes may have occurred, a greater use of qualitative sources has been encouraged in marine historical ecology. We examined diverse historical information (including maritime history...

This article is a commentary on Schmidt et al. 26, 5574-5587

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...

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...

Warming of the global climate is now unequivocal and its impact on Earth’ functional units has become more apparent. Here, we show that marine ecosystems are not equally sensitive to climate change and reveal a critical thermal boundary where a small increase in temperature triggers abrupt ecosystem shifts seen across multiple trophic levels. This large‐scale boundary is located in regions where abrupt ecosystem shifts have be...

Data from stock assessments were used to compare stock biomass, annual growth (Gs) and surplus production per capita (TSPc) and per unit biomass (TSPb) among 15 cod ( Gadus morhua ) stocks in the North Atlantic. TSPc ranged from 99 to 1012 g per fish among stocks and averaged 448 g per fish. TSPb ranged from 140 to 469 g kg −1 among stocks and averaged 294 g kg −1 . Gs varied considerably with low growth production associated...