Climate change is exacerbating existing environmental stressors through changes to the fundamental drivers of ecosystems. These changes in temperature, precipitation, seasonal cycles, biogeochemistry impact processes such as deoxygenation, nutrient and carbon cycling, respiration rates, stratification, ocean circulation, upwelling, and mixing. This leads to implications for the prevalence, severity, and duration of harmful algal blooms, ocean acidification, and hypoxia events. Understanding how these multiple stressors interact and subsequently impact species, habitat assemblages, and ecosystems is critical for place-based management.
Advancing our understanding through both western science and other traditional ways of knowing the combined impacts of multiple stressors on the function and health of marine species within the context of climate change is important to improve decisions and management of ecosystems. This session is designed to share and expand our understanding of how multiple stressors are currently impacting ecosystems, and how these impacts will change and interact under future climate scenarios.
Organizer: Kaity Goldsmith, NOAA Ocean Acidifcation Program, [email protected]
Co-organizers: Erica Ombres