Award: OCE-2049626

The main objective were to study is to quantify how regional and climate-scale environmental variability affect the phenology and geography of fish early life stages in the Northeast Pacific. The study area includes the Northern, Central, and Southern California Current, and western Gulf of Alaska. These systems are well monitored, geographically connected, and share common atmospheric-oceanic forcing, and climate drivers. Additionally, some species span the entire region (e.g., arrowtooth flounder). In particular, the project aimed to assess the degree to which phenology and geography during egg, larval, and juvenile phases are fixed in space and/or time, or are linked to taxa specific environmental preferences; Estimate trade-offs between whether fishes adapt to changing environmental conditions (i.e., warming temperatures) by altering their spawning phenology and/or geographic distribution and conduct projections of species distribution through different life history stages, assessing how projections might differ depending on whether or not each life history stage is taken into account.

This effort has led to the development and implementation of downscaled climate change projections for the study of impacts on early life stages in the California Current and the Gulf of Alaska for target species. This is noteworthy because most prior work has not addressed changes in species distribution across the boundaries of these two large marine ecosystems (LMEs). Efforts from this proposal will also provide insight on best practices for the study of coupled physical-biological marine systems under future climate projections including the development of appropriate downscaling techniques and uncertainty quantification.  

Last Modified: 12/29/2025
Modified by: Enrique N Curchitser