Abstract
Although nonstationarity in marine ecosystems has attracted great attention, the nonstationary responses of demersal fishes to environmental variations induced by the changing climate are still not well understood. Here, we collected 21 time series of demersal fishes from 1956 to 2015 to investigate the climate-induced nonstationary responses in temperate waters of the northwestern North Pacific (NWP). We showed that these demersal fishes experienced state shifts in approximately 1986/87, accompanied by abrupt warming over this region. Moreover, the relationships between demersal fishes and sea surface temperature (SST) were found to change between the two identified eras (i.e., a weak relationship before 1986 and a strong negative relationship after 1986), which may be primarily caused by the alternating dominance of the East Asian winter monsoon and mega-ENSO on SST in temperate waters of the NWP. The identified climate-induced nonstationary responses of demersal fishes to SST variability in this study may provide implications for understanding climate-induced biological dynamics, predicting demersal fish fluctuations, coping with potential ecological risks, and the sustainable exploitation of fishery resources in the future climate. Note that the impact of fishing on the demersal fishes in temperate waters of the NWP was not assessed in this study due to the lack of fishing effort data and therefore the conclusions of our research should be approached with caution.
Highlights
IntroductionNonstationarity in marine ecosystems has received growing attention in the past few years [1,2,3,4]
With accelerating climate change, nonstationarity in marine ecosystems has received growing attention in the past few years [1,2,3,4]
The results of the Bayesian version of the dynamic factor analysis (DFA) showed that the shared trend loaded positively for almost all time series of demersal fishes except for Silver seabream, Yellow goosefish, Daggertooth pike conger, and Small yellow croaker, suggesting that these species have opposite abundance dynamics (Figure 2a)
Summary
Nonstationarity in marine ecosystems has received growing attention in the past few years [1,2,3,4]. A process with a constant probability density over time is deemed stationary. Ecological systems are usually nonstationary and are characterized by changes in the distribution, growth, phenology, and behavior of single species as well as the species composition, ecological structure, and ecological processes, resulting in the combination of new species and unexpected “ecological surprises” or the extinction of existing species and destruction of existing communities in the future [4,5]. Traditional investigations on the effects of climate change on marine life were generally based on the assumption of stability with constant probability densities, which seem to be inappropriate for studies over long time scales (e.g., multidecadal time scales) [4]
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