title: Climate impacts on global hot spots of marine biodiversity.
abstract: Human activities drive environmental changes at scales that could potentially cause ecosystem collapses in the marine environment. We combined information on marine biodiversity with spatial assessments of the impacts of climate change to identify the key areas to prioritize for the conservation of global marine biodiversity. This process identified six marine regions of exceptional biodiversity based on global distributions of 1729 species of fish, 124 marine mammals, and 330 seabirds. Overall, these hot spots of marine biodiversity coincide with areas most severely affected by global warming. In particular, these marine biodiversity hot spots have undergone local to regional increasing water temperatures, slowing current circulation, and decreasing primary productivity. Furthermore, when we overlapped these hot spots with available industrial fishery data, albeit coarser than our estimates of climate impacts, they suggest a worrying coincidence whereby the world's richest areas for marine biodiversity are also those areas mostly affected by both climate change and industrial fishing. In light of these findings, we offer an adaptable framework for determining local to regional areas of special concern for the conservation of marine biodiversity. This has exposed the need for finer-scaled fishery data to assist in the management of global fisheries if the accumulative, but potentially preventable, effect of fishing on climate change impacts is to be minimized within areas prioritized for marine biodiversity conservation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Wetland Ecology, Estación Biológica de Doñana-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (EBD-CSIC), Sevilla, Spain.; Research Department, Phillip Island Nature Parks, Cowes, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9670-486X
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ramírez
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de SIG y Teledetección-EBD (LAST-EBD), EBD-CSIC, Sevilla, Spain.
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-3874-0461
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Afán
authors.affiliation: Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Lloyd S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Davis
authors.affiliation: Research Department, Phillip Island Nature Parks, Cowes, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: André
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-6178-4211
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chiaradia
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D001717:Birds / Q000502:physiology; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D017753:Ecosystem; D005399:Fishes / Q000502:physiology; D057232:Global Warming; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals / Q000502:physiology
keywords: climate and human threats; climate change; environmental variability; human fisheries; marine biodiversity; remote sensing