
Barbara MuhlingUniversity of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · CIMEC
Barbara Muhling
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102
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Publications
Publications (102)
Anchovies and sardines are some of the most economically and ecologically important and well-studied fishes on Earth, but there is still uncertainty regarding how distributions and abundances change through time and space. We bring together larval abundance data for northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax) and Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) collected...
Climate change can impact marine ecosystems through many biological and ecological processes. Ecosystem models are one tool that can be used to simulate how the complex impacts of climate change may manifest in a warming world. In this study, we used an end‐to‐end Atlantis ecosystem model to compare and contrast the effects of climate‐driven specie...
Ecosystem function and variability of eastern boundary upwelling systems is linked to the population dynamics of coastal pelagic fish. Developing population dynamics models of coastal pelagic species over many decades has unique challenges, and can benefit from the integration of multiple disparate sources of fisheries and resource survey informati...
Recent increases in frequency and intensity of warm water anomalies and marine heatwaves have led to shifts in species ranges and assemblages. Genomic tools can be instrumental in detecting such shifts. In the early stages of a project assessing population genetic structure in Pacific Sardine ( Sardinops sagax ), we detected the presence of Japanes...
Climate change has rapidly altered marine ecosystems and is expected to continue to push systems and species beyond historical baselines into novel conditions. Projecting responses of organisms and populations to these novel environmental conditions often requires extrapolations beyond observed conditions, challenging the predictive limits of stati...
Aim
Marine biodiversity faces unprecedented threats from anthropogenic climate change. Ecosystem responses to climate change have exhibited substantial variability in the direction and magnitude of redistribution, posing challenges for developing effective climate‐adaptive marine management strategies.
Location
The California Current Ecosystem (CC...
Simplifying complex species interactions can facilitate tracking and predicting functional responses to ecological stressors. This is important for highly migratory pelagic predators, exploiting diverse prey fields as they respond to dynamic environments. We reconstructed the historical resource use of albacore tuna ( Thunnus alalunga ) globally fr...
Fishers often target multiple species. More diverse harvest portfolios may reduce income risk, increasing resilience to climate-driven changes in target species’ spatial distributions and availability. Moreover, different effects can be observed across vessels in response to the same shocks and stressors, as fishers are heterogeneous. Evaluation of...
Large predators frequent the open ocean where subsurface light drives visually based trophic interactions. However, we lack knowledge on how predators achieve energy balance in the unproductive open ocean where prey biomass is minimal in well-lit surface waters but high in dim midwaters in the form of scattering layers. We use an interdisciplinary...
A 2-day virtual stakeholder engagement workshop in support of the NOAA-funded Future Seas project was held November 28 and 29, 2022. Attendees included academic and government scientists as well as representatives of the National Marine Fisheries Service West Coast Region, the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, the Pacific Fishery Management Counc...
The management and conservation of tuna and other transboundary marine species have to date been limited by an incomplete understanding of the oceanographic, ecological and socioeconomic factors mediating fishery overlap and interactions, and how these factors vary across expansive, open ocean habitats. Despite advances in fisheries monitoring and...
Marine heatwaves cause widespread environmental, biological, and socioeconomic impacts, placing them at the forefront of 21st-century management challenges. However, heatwaves vary in intensity and evolution, and a paucity of information on how this variability impacts marine species limits our ability to proactively manage for these extreme events...
Marine heatwaves are increasingly affecting marine ecosystems, with cascading impacts on coastal economies, communities, and food systems. Studies of heatwaves provide crucial insights into potential ecosystem shifts under future climate change and put fisheries social-ecological systems through “stress tests” that expose both vulnerabilities and r...
Marine heatwaves (MHW) affect a wide variety of organisms with diverse ecological roles and positions in food webs. These extreme events have direct positive or negative impacts on individuals’ physiology that can upscale to the population level, leading to dramatic changes in population size (e.g., recruitment, mass-mortalities), and modified dist...
Juvenile North Pacific Albacore tuna ( Thunnus alalunga ) support commercial and recreational fisheries in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME), where they forage during summer and fall. The distributions of the commercial and recreational fisheries and estimates of forage availability have varied substantially over the past centur...
Forage fishes are key energy conduits that transfer primary and secondary productivity to higher trophic levels. As novel environmental conditions caused by climate change alter ecosystems and predator-prey dynamics, there is a critical need to understand how forage fish control bottom-up forcing of food web dynamics. In the northeast Pacific, nort...
Subseasonal to decadal ocean forecasting can make significant contributions to achieving effective management of living marine resources in a changing ocean. Most applications rely on indirect proxies, however, often measured at the ocean surface and lacking a direct mechanistic link to the dynamics of marine populations.
Here, we take advantage of...
Market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) constitute one of California’s largest fisheries by landings and are an essential prey item for numerous top predators in the California Current ecosystem. However, extreme fluctuations in market squid abundance inhibit our ability to forecast local recruitment. We generate a species distribution model for mark...
Small pelagic fish are important marine ecosystem components and highly variable fisheries resources. In the California Current upwelling system, Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) has supported important fisheries in the past, but contrary to expectations, remains at low biomass despite recent warm ocean conditions. We developed a data-driven, proc...
Many marine species are shifting their distributions in response to changing ocean conditions, posing significant challenges and risks for fisheries management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are used to project future species distributions in the face of a changing climate. Information to fit SDMs generally comes from two main sources: fishery...
Ensuring the long-term sustainability of tuna, billfish, and other transboundary fisheries resources begins with data on the status of stocks, as well as information concerning who catches what fish, when, where, and how. Despite recent improvements in fisheries monitoring and surveillance, such dynamics remain poorly understood across the high sea...
Projecting the future distributions of commercially and ecologically important species has become a critical approach for ecosystem managers to strategically anticipate change, but large uncertainties in projections limit climate adaptation planning. Although distribution projections are primarily used to understand the scope of potential change ‐...
Despite their broad distribution across the North Pacific Ocean, the only known spawning grounds for Pacific Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus orientalis) are around coastal Japan and the East China Sea. However, an increase in the prevalence of large bluefin tuna up to 10 years old in the California Current System during exceptionally warm ocean conditions ha...
North Pacific albacore (Thunnus alalunga) is a commercially important tuna species known to undertake extensive migratory movements between nearshore waters of the California Current and offshore environments in the central Pacific. However, these migration behaviors are highly variable, with some individuals traveling thousands of kilometers withi...
Among the largest fish species, the basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is found circumglobally in temperate and tropical waters. Though historical documents have recorded their presence in the California Current Ecosystem (CCE), basking sharks are now only rarely observed in this part of their range. We compiled recent and historical data from syst...
Climate change is impacting the abundance and distribution of marine resources. The consequences of these impacts are likely to alter trophic interactions between species within an ecosystem and affect fisheries opportunities for coastal communities. Market squid Doryteuthis opalescens comprise the largest fishery (by volume) in California, USA, an...
In the California Current ecosystem, a portfolio of pelagic species, such as Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax), Northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax), Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), chub (Scomber japonicus) and jack (Trachurus symmetricus) mackerels and California market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) support a wide variety of fish, mammal and se...
Climate change may impact ocean ecosystems through a number of mechanisms, including shifts in primary productivity or plankton community structure, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation. These processes can be simulated with global Earth system models (ESMs), which are increasingly being used in the context of fisheries management and other livin...
One of the significant challenges to using information and ideas generated through ecosystem models and analyses for ecosystem-based fisheries management is the disconnect between modeling and management needs. Here we present a case study from the U.S. West Coast, the stakeholder review of NOAA’s annual ecosystem status report for the California C...
Efforts to manage living marine resources (LMRs) under climate change need projections of future ocean conditions, yet most global climate models (GCMs) poorly represent critical coastal habitats. GCM utility for LMR applications will increase with higher spatial resolution but obstacles including computational and data storage costs, obstinate reg...
Accurate forecasts of how animals respond to climate‐driven environmental change are needed to prepare for future redistributions, however, it is unclear which temporal scales of environmental variability give rise to predictability of species distributions. We examined the temporal scales of environmental variability that best predicted spatial ab...
Time-area closures are a valuable tool for mitigating fisheries bycatch. There is increasing recognition that dynamic closures, which have boundaries that vary across space and time, can be more effective than static closures at protecting mobile species in dynamic environments. We created a management strategy evaluation to compare static and dyna...
Many fish species are shifting spatial distributions in response to climate change, but projecting these shifts and measuring their impact at fine scales are challenging. We present a simulation that projects change in fishery landings due to spatial distribution shifts, by combining regional ocean and biogeochemical models (forced by three earth s...
Marine fisheries around the globe are increasingly exposed to external drivers of social and ecological change. Though diversification and flexibility have historically helped marine resource users negotiate risk and adversity, much of modern fisheries management treats fishermen as specialists using specific gear types to target specific species....
Spatial distributions of marine fauna are determined by complex interactions between environmental conditions and animal behaviors. As climate change leads to warmer, more acidic, and less oxygenated oceans, species are shifting away from their historical distribution ranges, and these trends are expected to continue into the future. Correlative Sp...
Time‐area closures are an important tool for reducing fisheries bycatch, but their effectiveness and economic impact can be influenced by the changes in species distributions. For fisheries targeting highly mobile species, the economic impact of a closure may by highly dynamic, depending on the current suitability of the closed area for the target...
This report is intended as part of the important dialogue between the ocean colour and the biogeochemical/ecosystem/climate modelling communities. Numerical modellers are frequent users of ocean colour products, but many modellers remain unsure of the best way to use these products, and are often unaware of the uncertainties associated with them. O...
Juvenile north Pacific albacore (Thunnus alalunga) forage in the California Current System (CCS), supporting fisheries between Baja California and British Columbia. Within the CCS, their distribution, abundance, and foraging behaviors are strongly variable interannually. Here, we use catch logbook data and trawl survey records to investigate how ju...
We propose a score test for testing independence of the marginals based on Lakshminarayana’s bivariate Poisson probability mass function. Each marginal distribution of the bivariate model is a univariate Poisson distribution, and the parameters of the bivariate distribution can be estimated using maximum likelihood methods. The simulation study sho...
We investigate the impact of oceanographic variability on Pacific bluefin tuna (Thunnus orientalis: PBF) distributions in the California Current system using remotely sensed environmental data, and fishery‐dependent data from multiple fisheries in a habitat‐modeling framework. We examined the effects of local oceanic conditions (sea surface tempera...
Compared to high-latitude seas, the ecological implications of climate change for top consumers in subtropical regions are poorly understood. One critical area of knowledge deficiency is the nature of food-web connections to larvae during their vulnerable time in the plankton. Bluefin tuna (BFT) are highly migratory temperate species whose early li...
Larval fishes are a useful metric of marine ecosystem state and change, as well as species-specific patterns in phenology. The high level of taxonomic expertise required to identify larval fishes to species level, and the considerable effort required to collect samples, make these data very valuable. Here we collate 3178 samples of larval fish asse...
Future sustainable management of fisheries will require resilience to the effects of environmental variability and climate change on stock productivity. In this study, we examined relationships between sea surface temperature (SST) in the region between Taiwan and the Sea of Japan, and annual recruitment of Pacific bluefin tuna (Thunnus orientalis:...
Tunas show a wide variety of life history strategies, spatial distributions and migratory behaviors, yet they share a common trait of spawning only in tropical and sub-tropical regions. The warm-water tuna species generally show significant overlap between spawning and feeding grounds, and longer spawning seasons of several months to near year-roun...
Abstract Illness caused by pathogenic strains of Vibrio bacteria incurs significant economic and health care costs in many areas around the world. In the Chesapeake Bay, the two most problematic species are V. vulnificus and V. parahaemolyticus, which cause infection both from exposure to contaminated water and consumption of contaminated seafood....
Pelagic fishes support some of the highest yield fisheries worldwide, but the impacts of climate change on the distribution, recruitment and sustainability of these species remain largely uncertain. Several projected changes to the world's oceans are highly relevant to pelagic fishes, including warming, changes in circulation patterns and altered p...
Estuaries are productive and ecologically important ecosystems, incorporating environmental drivers from watersheds, rivers, and the coastal ocean. Climate change has potential to modify the physical properties of estuaries, with impacts on resident organisms. However, projections from general circulation models (GCMs) are generally too coarse to r...
Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) undertake extensive migrations throughout the North Atlantic Ocean, but spawn primarily in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and the Mediterranean Sea. Little is known about larval bluefin tuna (BFT) dynamics and growth despite numerous surveys conducted in the GOM. In this study, we describe age-length relationships...
Climate change is likely to drive complex shifts in the distribution and ecology of marine species. Projections of future changes may vary, however, depending on the biological impact model used. In this study, we compared a correlative species distribution model and a simple mechanistic oxygen balance model for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynn...
A close relationship between adult abundance and stock productivity may not exist for many marine fish stocks, resulting in concern that the management goal of maximum sustainable yield is either inefficient or risky. Although reproductive success is tightly coupled with adult abundance and fecundity in many terrestrial animals, in exploited marine...
The Gulf of Mexico (GOM) is the primary spawningground for western Atlantic bluefin tuna(Thunnusthynnus). In this work, information reported by previ-ous studies about the preferred environmental condi-tions for the occurrence of bluefin tuna larvae in theGOM is integrated into a dimensionless index, theBFT_Index. This index is used to evaluate the...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0133406.]. The species Thunnus thynnus is misspelled in the article title. The correct title is: Trophic Ecology of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) Larvae from the Gulf of Mexico and NW Mediterranean Spawning Grounds: A Comparative Stable Isotope Study. The correct citation is: Laiz-Carri...
The present study uses stable isotopes of nitrogen and carbon (δ 15 Nandδ 13 C) as trophic indicators for Atlantic bluefin tuna larvae (BFT) (6–10 mm standard length) in the highly contrasting environmental conditions of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and the Balearic Sea (MED). These regions are differentiated by their temperature regime and relative pr...
Ecologically and economically important coral reef fishes are believed to migrate to reefs from juvenile
nursery areas such as sea grass and mangrove habitats. Little is known about the migration corridors
that exist between nursery and coral reefs, or the timing of these migrations. This study investigated the
possibility of identifying connection...