Climate change vulnerability assessment of the main marine commercial fish and invertebrates of Portugal

Juan Bueno-Pardo,Francisco Leitão,Pedro M Sousa,João N Monteiro,Henrique Queiroga,Luís Chícharo,Eudriano F S Costa,Susan Kay,Andreia Ovelheiro,Miguel Gaspar,Vasco M N C S Vieira,Daniela Nobre,Maria A Teodósio,Karim Erzini,Vânia Baptista

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-82595-5

Abstract

This is the first attempt to apply an expert-based ecological vulnerability assessment of the effects of climate change on the main marine resources of Portugal. The vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and expected directional effects of 74 species of fish and invertebrates of commercial interest is estimated based on criteria related to their life-history and level of conservation or exploitation. This analysis is performed separately for three regions of Portugal and two scenarios of climate change (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5). To do that, the fourth assessment report IPCC framework for vulnerability assessments was coupled to the outputs of a physical-biogeochemical model allowing to weight the exposure of the species by the expected variability of the environmental variables in the future. The highest vulnerabilities were found for some migratory and elasmobranch species, although overall vulnerability scores were low probably due to the high adaptive capacity of species from temperate ecosystems. Among regions, the highest average vulnerability was estimated for the species in the Central region while higher vulnerabilities were identified under climate change scenario RCP 8.5 in the three regions, due to higher expected climatic variability. This work establishes the basis for the assessment of the vulnerability of the human activities relying on marine resources in the context of climate change.

Highlights

This is the first attempt to apply an expert-based ecological vulnerability assessment of the effects of climate change on the main marine resources of Portugal
The salinity is expected to be lower in the future than in the reference period (Table 2), specially under climate change scenario RCP 8.5 in the three regions, with the drop being higher in a gradient from the North to the South
The experts allocated five tallies across the three bins described for each indicator representing their certainty on the voting, introducing a gradation of truth in the scoring of the global vulnerability[26]

Summary

Introduction

The frequency and intensity of upwelling events increased in recent years in P ortugal[6] (but see Ref.[11] for an opposite t rend[12]) These environmental changes are likely to lead to consequences for the main fisheries of Portugal, including changes in the catch composition by the introduction of subtropical s pecies[13], or fluctuations of landings due to environmental changes with mechanistic consequences on the recruitment of small and medium pelagics[14,15,16,17,18] found a general decreasing trend of landings of species with affinity for temperate waters and an opposite trend for species with affinity for subtropical/tropical waters, evidencing that species might respond differently to climate change due to their ecology and biology. These works relate observed fish landings to environmental time series and usually lack a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between environment and (i) organisms ecology or (ii) fisheries functioning, being limited to inferring the evolution of these fisheries under future scenarios of climate change

Methods

Results

Conclusion