European cephalopods distribution under climate-change scenarios

Alexandre Schickele,Virginie Raybaud,Patrice Francour

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-83457-w

Abstract

In a context of increasing anthropogenic pressure, projecting species potential distributional shifts is of major importance for the sustainable exploitation of marine species. Despite their major economical (i.e. important fisheries) and ecological (i.e. central position in food-webs) importance, cephalopods literature rarely addresses an explicit understanding of their current distribution and the potential effect that climate change may induce in the following decades. In this study, we focus on three largely harvested and common cephalopod species in Europe: Octopus vulgaris, Sepia officinalis and Loligo vulgaris. Using a recently improved species ensemble modelling framework coupled with five atmosphere–ocean general circulation models, we modelled their contemporary and potential future distributional range over the twenty-first century. Independently of global warming scenarios, we observed a decreasing in the suitability of environmental conditions in the Mediterranean Sea and the Bay of Biscay. Conversely, we projected a rapidly increasing environmental suitability in the North, Norwegian and Baltic Seas for all species. This study is a first broad scale assessment and identification of the geographical areas, fisheries and ecosystems impacted by climate-induced changes in cephalopods distributional range.

Highlights

In a context of increasing anthropogenic pressure, projecting species potential distributional shifts is of major importance for the sustainable exploitation of marine species
In order to alleviate the effect of spatially heterogenous sampling effort, that may induce biases in the environmental space used by the models, we proceeded to an environmental filtration[71]: for each species and combination of environmental factors (e.g. Sea Bottom Temperature (SBT) × SBT range; see Supplementary Appendix 2) tested in the models, we considered only a single occurrence record among each group of observations characterised by the same environmental values (e.g. SBT of 15 °C, SBT range of 10 °C)
We highlighted an opposite response to climate change between northern and southern Europe

Summary

Introduction

In a context of increasing anthropogenic pressure, projecting species potential distributional shifts is of major importance for the sustainable exploitation of marine species. Global climate change is directly altering the living environment of marine species[15,16,17], especially temperature (i.e. yearly average and extreme climatic events) that is of major importance in the lifecycle of cephalopods (e.g. size and number of eggs, growth rate)[5,10,18] In this context, a global proliferation of cephalopods has been reported in recent y ears[19], including locally observed distributional range shifts and an important climate-induced variability (e.g. spawning season, recruitment) in temperate seas (e.g. in the North and Yellow seas)[20,21,22]. Coupled with several climate models, these multi-algorithm procedures are known to produce a robust assessment of both contemporary and future distribution as well as the uncertainty associated to niche estimation and climate projections[40,41,42,43]

Methods

Results

Conclusion