During the 1990s, coastal habitat off southeastern Massachusetts (SEMA) supported commercially viable fisheries for American lobster ( Homarus americanus ). Over the past two decades, landings and post‐larval settlement of lobsters in this region, which is near the southern edge of the species' range, have declined substantially, concurrent with a period of significant warming of the coastal waters off southern New England. Pr...

Understanding the processes that influence recruitment variability in marine populations has been a long-standing challenge for resource management. Quantifying abundance at early life stages for marine fish and invertebrates with complex life histories can be difficult and require unconventional sampling approaches. However, the benefit of developing appropriate tools to sample early life stages is that, together with associa...

Ocean warming can drive poleward shifts of commercially important species with potentially significant economic impacts. Nowhere are those impacts greater than in the Gulf of Maine where North America's most valuable marine species, the American lobster ( Homarus americanus Milne Edwards), has thrived for decades. However, there are growing concerns that regional maritime economies will suffer as monitored shallow water young‐...

Time series of American lobster ( Homarus americanus ) postlarval settlement from southern New England to Atlantic Canada exhibit many common features, and a cluster analysis indicates a block of regions extending from Massachusetts to Maine that have coherent interannual variations. The spatial scale of this block suggests that variability in settlement is related to large‐scale, rather than local, processes. We examined the...

The influence of landscape structure on marine ecological processes is receiving increasing attention. However, few studies conducted in coastal marine habitats have evaluated whether the effects of landscape structure on species interactions and organismal behavior are consistent across the range of an organism, over which landscape context and the strength of species interactions typically vary. American lobster ( Homarus am...

We used a coupled biophysical model to investigate larval transport and connectivity patterns in the Gulf of Maine lobster ( Homarus americanus ) population. Biological ‘particles’ were released at over 21 000 locations every 10 days over a 4‐month hatching period, and were followed from hatching through late postlarval stage. In addition to circulation and dispersion, model calculations included spatial patterns of egg produc...

Passive collectors are used widely in postlarval settlement and recruitment monitoring of spiny lobsters and crabs, but they have only been used in a limited way with clawed lobsters. For nearly two decades, diver‐based suction sampling has served to monitor spatial‐temporal patterns of American lobster (Homarus americanus) postlarval settlement and early juvenile abundance in shallow near‐shore nurseries. Collectors could rev...

Seabed mapping, spatially referenced trapping, and mark‐recapture methods have all been useful tools in ecological studies of lobsters and other benthic animals. Here we integrate the three methods to evaluate local population dynamics and movements of American lobsters, Homarus americanus, in coastal fishing grounds in Maine, United States. The study was conducted on five study areas of different size, and used two different...