Polar cod ( Boreogadus saida ) is a widespread, cold-adapted fish that plays a central role in Arctic food webs. Rising temperatures, declining sea ice, and associated changes in ecosystem dynamics may threaten this species. We investigated the influence of temperature on the pre-winter size of juvenile polar cod (an important predictor of overwinter survival and recruitment), examining hatch timing and growth across warm and...

Fisheries are facing increasingly frequent and severe climate change‐related stressors such as marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms, and species distribution shifts. Many fisheries management bodies have been working to increase the capacity of their regulatory systems to adapt to these new conditions, but progress has been slow and piecemeal. To identify the most important barriers to this adaptation, in spring 2024 we surv...

One important measure of biodiversity is functional diversity within a given assemblage, because it provides information about the collective roles that species play in an ecosystem. The expressed functional diversity of an assemblage can be thought of as realized niche space occupied by species present, shaped in part by characteristics of the available habitat. Assessing functional traits can therefore provide some indicatio...

Marine fishery management systems are experiencing unprecedented pressure from climate change. Prior research has identified adaptive traits that, when present in a management system, can promote effective responses to these changes and minimise negative outcomes for fish and fishery systems. Understanding the extent to which managers identify these traits as important and actively influencing management can identify gaps and...

Spatial models that identify statistical relationships between environmental conditions and species distributional data are commonly used in fisheries research to evaluate habitat suitability and predict distributional shifts, such as those driven by changing ocean temperature and oxygen levels. However, a lack of environmental data—particularly dissolved oxygen—at the same temporal and spatial resolution as biological data ca...

As the oceans change, the abundance of parasites and the risk of infection to marine mammals may also be changing. Nematodes in the family Anisakidae can harm marine mammals, and recent studies have revealed a global increase in these parasites, but the cause is unknown. We sought to determine how anisakid risk in Puget Sound had changed over 98 years by conducting a parasitological analysis of museum specimens of the prey spe...

Pacific herring ( Clupea pallasii ) is a foundational species in Puget Sound (Washington State, U.S.A.) and is subject to many anthropogenic threats. We assessed the overall status of the Puget Sound Pacific herring sub-stock complex and asked whether watersheds with less urban or agricultural land cover, less impervious surface, and lower human density were associated with better stock status. To this end, we developed multip...

Corals are experiencing unprecedented decline from climate change‐induced mass bleaching events. Dispersal not only contributes to coral reef persistence through demographic rescue but can also hinder or facilitate evolutionary adaptation. Locations of reefs that are likely to survive future warming therefore remain largely unknown, particularly within the context of both ecological and evolutionary processes across complex se...

Global environmental change is challenging species with novel conditions, such that demographic and evolutionary trajectories of populations are often shaped by the exchange of organisms and alleles across landscapes. Current ecological theory predicts that random networks with dispersal shortcuts connecting distant sites can promote persistence when there is no capacity for evolution. Here, we show with an eco‐evolutionary mo...

Recent observations of record low winter sea-ice coverage and warming water temperatures in the eastern Bering Sea have signaled the potential impacts of climate change on this ecosystem, which have implications for commercial fisheries production. We investigate the impacts of forecasted climate change on the eastern Bering Sea food web through the end of the century under medium- and high-emissions climate scenarios in combi...

Median bull trout Salvelinus confluentus breeding was 2 weeks earlier in a cool stream than in a proximate warmer stream, aligning with expectations for salmonids, followed by emergence timing calculated to be 6 weeks later in the cool stream than the warm stream. This pattern is consistent with both site‐specific adaptation and thermal spawning threshold hypotheses for life‐history event timing in this threatened species.

Ecosystem‐based fishery management requires considering the effects of actions on social, natural and economic systems. These considerations are important for forage fish fisheries, because these species provide ecosystem services as a key prey in food webs and support valuable commercial fisheries. Forage fish stocks fluctuate naturally, and fishing may make these fluctuations more pronounced, yet harvest strategies intended...

Forage fish are a vital part of marine ecosystems, partly by supporting some of the largest fisheries worldwide, but also due to their role in food webs as prey for larger fish and other predators. One of the unresolved questions about forage fish dynamics is the causes of their significant temporal fluctuations. These fluctuations are often attributed to changes in environmental conditions, but direct correlations have proven...

Predation can play an important role in population, community and ecosystem processes. When predator guilds are diverse, fluctuations in individual predator populations may have small influences on the guild at large, suggesting that predator diversity stabilizes the amount of predation prey experience. The strength of this phenomenon depends on how synchronously populations within predator assemblages vary and whether all pre...

Population endangerment typically arises from multiple, potentially interacting anthropogenic stressors. Extensive research has investigated the consequences of multiple stressors on organisms, frequently focusing on individual life stages. Less is known about population‐level consequences of exposure to multiple stressors, especially when exposure varies through life. We provide the first theoretical basis for identifying spe...

The benefits and ecosystem services that humans derive from the oceans are threatened by numerous global change stressors, one of which is ocean acidification. Here, we describe the effects of ocean acidification on an upwelling system that already experiences inherently low pH conditions, the California Current. We used an end‐to‐end ecosystem model (Atlantis), forced by downscaled global climate models and informed by a meta...

Individual quota (IQ) management systems in commercial marine fisheries are highly diverse, differing in the security, durability and exclusivity of the harvesting privilege and the transferability of quota units. This diversity in the degree of harvest rights may influence the effectiveness of IQ fisheries to meet management objectives. We conducted a global meta‐analysis of 167 stocks managed under IQs to test whether the st...