Climate change impacts on marine resources : From individual to ecosystem responses

Abstract

Temperature has a major direct effect on the physiology, growth, reproduction, recruitment and behavior of poikilothermic organisms such as fish. It affects many physiological processes ranging from damaging proteins to disrupting organ function. Environmental changes, especially climate warming, may thus strongly influence the abundance and biogeography of fish through species-specific physiological thresholds of temperature tolerance, or through responses to changes in other trophic levels (Perry et al. 2005, Sabates et al. 2006, Rijnsdorp et al. 2009). Organisms tend to adapt to local environmental temperatures, with optimal physiological responses matching temperatures that are close to the environmental average (Hoegh-Guldberg & Bruno 2010). In this context, shifts in the spatial distribution range of marine organisms are among the most perceptible consequences of climate change at the world scale, with potentially significant impacts on commercial fisheries (Perry et al. 2005), on food webs and ecosystem functioning (Doney et al. 2012, Albouy et al. 2014), and on biodiversity as a whole (Harley 2011, Bellard et al. 2012).

The warming of the Mediterranean Sea affects the fitness of marine biota as already shown by records of changes in abundance, survival and fertility,phenology and species migration (Marbà et al. 2015). Population abundance and survival are the biological variables are the most frequently reported impacts of Mediterranean warming, followed by migration of native and introduced species (Marbà et al. 2015). However, the sensitivity of Mediterranean biota to warming varies across taxonomic groups (Marbà et al. 2015), from primary producers to high trophic levels, with possible synergistic effects with other anthropogenic impacts such as high exploitation (Harley et al. 2006). In this chapter, we use examples to analyze the expected impacts of climate change on marine organisms in the Mediterranean Sea, with a focus on fish, and to investigate possible responses from individual to ecosystem level. It is important to bear in mind that in the Mediterranean Sea, the effects of climate change occur in parallel with other human-driven effects such as overfishing, pollution, and habitat degradation (Coll et al. 2010), and can have cumulative effects, frequently of synergistic nature (Calvo et al. 2011)