{"title":"From land to deep sea: A continuum of cumulative human impacts on marine habitats in Atlantic Canada","authors":"Grace E. P. Murphy, Andy Stock, Noreen E. Kelly","doi":"10.1002/ecs2.4964","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Effective management and mitigation of multiple human impacts on marine ecosystems require accurate knowledge of the spatial patterns of human activities and their overlap with vulnerable habitats. Cumulative impact (CI) mapping combines spatial information and the intensity of human activities with the spatial extent of habitats and their vulnerabilities to those stressors into an intuitive relative CI score that can inform marine spatial planning processes and ecosystem-based management. Here, we mapped potential CIs of 45 human activities from five sectors (climate change, land-based, marine-based, coastal, commercial fishing) on 21 habitats in Atlantic Canada's Scotian Shelf bioregion. We applied an uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of results and identify hot and cold spots of CIs. Nearly the entire Scotian Shelf bioregion experiences the CIs of human activities, and high CIs were frequently associated with multiple stressors. CIs varied widely across habitats: CI scores in habitats >30 m deep were dominated by climate change and commercial fishing, while nearshore habitats were influenced by a much wider range of activities across all five sectors. When standardized by area, coastal habitats had among the highest CI scores, highlighting the intensity of multiple stressors in these habitats despite their relatively small spatial extent and emphasizing the importance of a multisector approach when managing coastal ecosystems. Robust hot spots of CIs (i.e., areas with high CI scores that were insensitive to alternative modeling assumptions and simulated data quality issues) occurred mostly in coastal areas where multiple high-intensity activities overlapped with highly vulnerable biogenic habitats. In contrast, robust cold spots of CI mostly occurred offshore. Overall, our results emphasize the need to consider CIs in management and protection and demonstrates that, in many areas, targeting only one activity will be insufficient to reduce overall human impact. The CI map will be useful to highlight areas in need of protection from multiple human impacts, provide information for ecological indicator development, and establish a baseline of the current state of human use in the bioregion.</p>","PeriodicalId":48930,"journal":{"name":"Ecosphere","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecs2.4964","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ecosphere","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.4964","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Effective management and mitigation of multiple human impacts on marine ecosystems require accurate knowledge of the spatial patterns of human activities and their overlap with vulnerable habitats. Cumulative impact (CI) mapping combines spatial information and the intensity of human activities with the spatial extent of habitats and their vulnerabilities to those stressors into an intuitive relative CI score that can inform marine spatial planning processes and ecosystem-based management. Here, we mapped potential CIs of 45 human activities from five sectors (climate change, land-based, marine-based, coastal, commercial fishing) on 21 habitats in Atlantic Canada's Scotian Shelf bioregion. We applied an uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of results and identify hot and cold spots of CIs. Nearly the entire Scotian Shelf bioregion experiences the CIs of human activities, and high CIs were frequently associated with multiple stressors. CIs varied widely across habitats: CI scores in habitats >30 m deep were dominated by climate change and commercial fishing, while nearshore habitats were influenced by a much wider range of activities across all five sectors. When standardized by area, coastal habitats had among the highest CI scores, highlighting the intensity of multiple stressors in these habitats despite their relatively small spatial extent and emphasizing the importance of a multisector approach when managing coastal ecosystems. Robust hot spots of CIs (i.e., areas with high CI scores that were insensitive to alternative modeling assumptions and simulated data quality issues) occurred mostly in coastal areas where multiple high-intensity activities overlapped with highly vulnerable biogenic habitats. In contrast, robust cold spots of CI mostly occurred offshore. Overall, our results emphasize the need to consider CIs in management and protection and demonstrates that, in many areas, targeting only one activity will be insufficient to reduce overall human impact. The CI map will be useful to highlight areas in need of protection from multiple human impacts, provide information for ecological indicator development, and establish a baseline of the current state of human use in the bioregion.
要有效管理和减轻人类对海洋生态系统的多重影响,就必须准确了解人类活动的空间模式及其与脆弱生境的重叠情况。累积影响(CI)绘图将空间信息和人类活动强度与栖息地的空间范围及其对这些压力源的脆弱性结合起来,形成直观的相对 CI 分数,可为海洋空间规划过程和基于生态系统的管理提供信息。在这里,我们绘制了加拿大大西洋斯科舍大陆架生物区 21 个栖息地的五个领域(气候变化、陆地、海洋、沿海、商业捕鱼)的 45 种人类活动的潜在 CI。我们采用不确定性和敏感性分析来评估结果的稳健性,并确定 CIs 的热点和冷点。几乎整个斯科舍大陆架生物区都受到了人类活动的 CIs 影响,高 CIs 通常与多种压力因素有关。不同栖息地的 CIs 差异很大:水深 30 米栖息地的 CI 分数主要受气候变化和商业捕鱼的影响,而近岸栖息地则受所有五个领域中更广泛活动的影响。当按面积标准化时,沿岸生境的 CI 分数最高,这表明尽管这些生境的空间范围相对较小,但多种压力因素在这些生境中的强度很大,并强调了在管理沿岸生态系统时采用多部门方法的重要性。强大的 CI 热点(即 CI 高分区域,对其他建模假设和模拟数据质量问题不敏感)主要出现在多种高强度活动与高度脆弱的生物栖息地重叠的沿岸地区。与此相反,CI 的强冷点大多出现在近海。总之,我们的结果强调了在管理和保护中考虑 CI 的必要性,并表明在许多地区,只针对一种活动不足以减少人类的总体影响。CI 地图将有助于突出需要保护的区域,使其免受人类的多重影响,为生态指标的开发提供信息,并建立生物区人类使用现状的基线。
期刊介绍:
The scope of Ecosphere is as broad as the science of ecology itself. The journal welcomes submissions from all sub-disciplines of ecological science, as well as interdisciplinary studies relating to ecology. The journal''s goal is to provide a rapid-publication, online-only, open-access alternative to ESA''s other journals, while maintaining the rigorous standards of peer review for which ESA publications are renowned.