Emily S. Klein

The Pew Charitable Trusts · Conservation Science

Nonlinear dynamics have been widely demonstrated in natural systems. In marine fisheries ecosystems, such dynamics have primarily been associated with exploited species, suggesting an anthropogenic stressor may explain their prevalence. However, this earlier work compared co-occurring exploited and unexploited species, as opposed to analyzing the s...

As a discipline, marine historical ecology (MHE) has contributed significantly to our understanding of the past state of the marine environment when levels of human impact were often very different from those today. What is less widely known is that insights from MHE have made headway into being applied within the context of present-day and long-te...

Shifting baselines describes the phenomenon where long-term changes to an environment go unrecognized because what is perceived as natural shifts with succeeding generations of scientists and other observers. This is a particular problem for the oceans because we are rarely able to directly observe the consequences of human activities. In the absen...

Multiple groundfish stocks in New England remain depleted despite management measures that have been effective elsewhere. A growing body of research suggests that environmental change driven by increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and ocean is unfolding more rapidly in New England than elsewhere, and is an important factor...

Abstract The concept of the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ has assisted researchers in understanding how expectations for the health of the environment deteriorate, despite known, often widespread, and significant impacts from human activities. The concept has been used to demonstrate that more accurate assessment of historical ecosystem decline can...

Case studies in support of Caswell et al. 2020.

Sidney J. Holt (1926–2019) was more than a founding father of quantitative fisheries science, and the man who "helped save the great whales." His accomplishments, over a career spanning seven decades, run deeper: he was a champion of reductionism (i.e. able to identify the factors essential for management) and a systemic thinker who inspired scient...

To implement ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management, decision makers need insight on the potential costs and benefits of the policy options available to them. In the Southern Ocean, two such options for addressing trade-offs between krill-dependent predators and the krill fishery include "feedback management" (FBM) strategies and marine...

Efforts are underway to forward a marine protected area (MPA) in the Western Antarctic Peninsula, guided by an internationally agreed framework of protected area objectives. Preliminary MPA boundaries were evaluated against some of these objectives using a static, map-based process, yet further assessment and additional objectives could be addresse...

Both costs and benefits must be considered when implementing marine protected areas (MPAs), particularly those associated with fishing effort displaced by potential closures. The Southern Ocean offers a case study in understanding such tradeoffs, where MPAs are actively being discussed to achieve a range of protection and sustainable use objectives...

The concept of ‘blue growth’, which aims to promote the growth of ocean economies whilst holistically managing marine socio-ecological systems, is emerging within national and international marine policy. The concept is often promoted as being novel, however, we show that, historical analogies exist which can provide insights for contemporary plann...

Models of human dimensions of fisheries are important to understanding and predicting how fishing industries respond to changes in marine ecosystems and management institutions. Advances in computation have made it possible to construct agent‐based models (ABMs)—which explicitly describe the behaviour of individual people, firms or vessels in order...

Models of human dimensions of fisheries are important to understanding and predicting how fishing industries respond to changes in marine ecosystems and management institutions. Advances in computation have made it possible to construct agent-based models (ABMs)—which explicitly describe the behaviour of individual people, firms, or vessels in orde...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Over the reporting period 2015–2017, the ICES Working Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries (WGHIST) was chaired by Emily Klein (USA) and Ruth Thurstan (UK). WGHIST is a forum for interdisciplinary research on social-ecological change in marine and fisheries systems over multi-decadal to centennial and even millennial times...

Climate change is a threat to marine ecosystems and the services they provide, and reducing fishing pressure is one option for mitigating the overall consequences for marine biota. We used a minimally realistic ecosystem model to examine how projected effects of ocean warming on the growth of Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, might affect populat...

Outcomes of ocean warming impacts on krill growth for whales and fish under RCP 8.5 by small-scale management unit. Marginal impacts on whale (A) and fish (B) abundance owing to the effects of ocean warming on krill growth from RCP 8.5 by the end of the 21st century. Areas without color indicate species group are not modeled as recruiting there. (T...

Proportional distributions of krill catch by SSMU. Proportions used in earlier versions of the model are under “Previous Model” (Table 2 in [13]). The updates used here, “Current Model”, are derived from catches taken during the 2009–2015 fishing seasons and under limits at finer spatial scales specified by current management [16]. Both include the...

Projected annual marginal impacts to assess lasting impacts of fishing on predator groups. The annual marginal impacts plotted each year (x-axis) across model scenarios when fishing is stopped immediately (green), after 20 years (orange), after 45 years (gray), after 70 years (yellow), or never, for penguins (A), seals (B), whales (C), and fish (D)...

Outcomes of ocean warming for krill and their predators under RCP 2.6 by small-scale management unit. Marginal impacts on krill biomass (A) and penguin (B), seal (C), whale (D), and fish (E) abundance owing to the effects of ocean warming on krill growth from RCP 2.6 by the end of the 21st century. Areas without color indicate species groups are no...

Changes in depletion due to fishing for whales and fish. Changes in modeled SSMU-specific risk of falling below the 75% depletion threshold (i.e. depletion risk) over the 21st century for whale (A, grey) and fish (B, blue) abundance owing to scenarios with and without fishing for the RCP 2.6 (large, light circles) and RCP 8.5 (small, dark circles)...

Diversity among scientists can foster better science (1, 2), yet engaging and retaining a diversity of students and researchers in science has been difficult (3). Actions that promote diversity are well defined (4), organizations are increasingly focused on diversity (5), and many institutions are developing initiatives to recruit and enroll studen...

Understanding how and when cooperative human behaviour forms in common-pool resource systems is critical to illuminating social-ecological systems and designing governance institutions that promote sustainable resource use. Before assessing the full complexity of social dynamics, it is essential to understand, concretely and mechanistically, how re...

Global warming has increased the frequency of extreme climate events, yet responses of biological and human communities are poorly understood, particularly for aquatic ecosystems and fisheries. Retrospective analysis of known outcomes may provide insights into the nature of adaptations and trajectory of subsequent conditions. We consider the 1815 e...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The ICES Working Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries (WGHIST) is a forum for interdisciplinary research on social-ecological change in marine and fisheries systems over multi-decadal to centennial timescales. It comprises a diverse group of researchers, including marine biologists, fisheries scientists, historians, and his...

The ICES Working Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries (WGHIST, 2015 -2017) is a forum for interdisciplinary research on social-ecological change in marine and fisheries systems over multi-decadal to multi-century timescales. It comprises a diverse group of researchers including marine biologists, fisheries scientists, historians, and historic...

Background/Question/Methods Human exploitation may push system dynamics from equilibrium to disequilibrium. For example, simple ecological models show populations can go from steady-state to chaotic as a result of increasing intrinsic growth rates. Such a change may result from harvesting, and studies have shown fish populations demonstrate such r...

Here we summarize presentations given at the theme session " Structure and Function of the Gulf of Maine System " of the 2009 Gulf of Maine Sympo-sium—Advancing Ecosystem Research for the Future of the Gulf, covering a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary research underway in one of the world's most intensively studied marine systems. Our objective...

In the fall of 2008, graduate students from eight universities—California State University Monterey Bay, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Connecticut, University of Hawai’i, University of Michigan, University of New Hampshire, University of South Florida, University of Washington—participated in a “Distributed Graduate Seminar”...

This thesis endeavors to develop methods for the historical analysis of a specific species and location to begin understanding fishery patterns and change over time. The main goal was to develop statistical methods to address historical data and provide long-term information on fishery trends and potential relationships between the fishery and outs...