Emma E Hodgson

• PhD. Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington; BSc. Conservation Biology, University of British Columbia
• PostDoc Position at Simon Fraser University

Habitat sensitivity is a consideration for decision-making under environmental laws in many jurisdictions. However, habitat sensitivity has been variously defined and there is no consistent approach to its quantification, which limits our understanding of how habitat sensitivity varies among systems and in response to different pressures. We review...

The value of estuaries as nursery habitat for juvenile anadromous salmon is likely variable across estuaries and species. Here, we compiled published empirical data on juvenile salmon estuarine growth and residency. We aimed to quantify the range and variability of these aspects for five species of Pacific salmon across estuaries, methodologies, an...

Metapopulations are often managed as a single contiguous population despite the spatial structure underlying their local and regional dynamics. Disturbances from human activities can also be spatially structured with mortality impacts concentrated to just a few local populations among the aggregate. Scale transitions between local and regional proc...

Global freshwater biodiversity is declining at rates greater than in terrestrial or marine environments, largely due to habitat alteration and loss. Pacific salmon are declining throughout much of their southern range due to a combination of pressures in their marine and freshwater habitats. There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand the mai...

Many small-scale fisheries are remote in nature, making data collection logistically difficult. Thus, there is a need for accessible solutions that address the data gaps present in these fisheries. One possible solution is to incorporate photography into community- or harvest-based monitoring frameworks and employ these images to estimate biologica...

Plain Language Summary The release of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere by human activities is altering ocean conditions including pH, oxygen, and temperature. One way to understand how these changing conditions will affect ecologically, economically, and culturally important marine species is to scale individual responses from laboratory ex...

Effective management of freshwater fish habitat is essential to supporting healthy aquatic ecosystems and sustainable fisheries. In Canada, recent changes to the Fisheries Act enhanced the protection of fish habitat, but application of those provisions relies on sound scientific evidence. We employed collaborative research prioritization methods to...

Fish biodiversity sustains the resilience and productivity of fisheries, yet this biodiversity can be threatened by overharvest and depletion in mixed‐stock fisheries. Thus, the biodiversity that provides benefits may also make sustainable resource extraction more difficult, a key challenge in fisheries management. We simulated a mixed‐stock fisher...

Article impact statement: Indigenous land users’ experiences of global ecological change can help researchers understand variable climate impacts and adaptations. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Rapid environmental change in the Arctic elicits numerous concerns for ecosystems, natural resources, and ways of life. Robust monitoring is essential to adaptation and management in light of these challenges, and community-based monitoring (CBM) projects can enhance these efforts by highlighting traditional knowledge, ensuring that questions are l...

Arctic regions are warming more than twice as quickly as other parts of the globe, threatening Arctic fish and wildlife and the human communities that rely on them. Assessing species' vulnerability to this change requires understanding their life histories and ecology, including movement patterns and habitat use. However, this information has not b...

Estuaries are productive ecosystems providing important habitat for a diversity of species, yet they also experience intense levels of anthropogenic development. To inform decision‐making, it is essential to understand the pathways of impacts of particular human activities, especially those that affect species such as salmon, which have high ecolog...

With the anticipated boom in the ‘blue economy’ and associated increases in industrialization across the world’s oceans, new and complex risks are being introduced to ocean ecosystems. As a result, conservation and resource management increasingly look to factor in potential interactions among the social, ecological and economic components of these...

Many of the world's ecosystems are experiencing a suite of changes from anthropogenic activities; the multiple stressors from those activities result in cumulative impacts. Understanding how these activities translate into ecological consequences is exceedingly challenging because of the inherent complexity within natural systems and the variabilit...

Marine ecosystems are experiencing rapid changes driven by anthropogenic stressors which, in turn, are affecting human communities. One such stressor is ocean acidification, a result of increasing carbon emissions. Most research on biological impacts of ocean acidification has focused on the responses of an individual species or life stage. Yet, un...

Species, habitats, and ecosystems are increasingly exposed to multiple anthropogenic stressors, fueling a rapidly expanding research program to understand the cumulative impacts of these environmental modifications. Since the 1970s, a growing set of methods has been developed through two parallel, sometimes connected, streams of research within the...

Increased recognition of the need for ecosystem-based management has resulted in a growing body of research on the use of indicators to represent and track ecosystem status, particularly in marine environments. While multiple frameworks have been developed for selecting and evaluating indicators, certain types of indicators require additional consi...

Populations of sardine, anchovy, and other forage species can fluctuate to low levels due to climate variability and fishing, leading to indirect effects on marine food webs. In the context of recent declines of sardine (Sardinops sagax) and anchovy (Engraulis mordax) in the California Current, we apply an end-to-end Atlantis ecosystem model that i...

Population endangerment typically arises from multiple, potentially interacting anthropogenic stressors. Extensive research has investigated the consequences of multiple stressors on organisms, frequently focusing on individual life stages. Less is known about population-level consequences of exposure to multiple stressors, especially when exposure...

The benefits and ecosystem services that humans derive from the oceans are threatened by numerous global change stressors, one of which is ocean acidification. Here, we describe the effects of ocean acidification on an upwelling system that already experiences inherently low pH conditions, the California Current. We used an end-to-end ecosystem mod...

Grant and fellowship proposal writing are key skills for professionals in scientific and research-driven fields, and early exposure and training in proposal writing substantially benefit early career scientists. Here, we present a framework for a student-led workshop for graduate fellowships that is built upon four years of implementation at the Un...

Species are experiencing a suite of novel stressors from anthropogenic activities that have impacts at multiple scales. Vulnerability assessment is one tool to evaluate the likely impacts that these stressors pose to species so that high-vulnerability cases can be identified and prioritized for monitoring, protection, or mitigation. Commonly used s...

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In response to our recent paper (1), Szuwalski and Hilborn (2) make several points about the timing of recruitment failures, the effect of fishing on productivity, and our choice of using biomass, not recruitment, as the indicator for collapses. We address these points here to show that not only do they not affect our conclusions, but that we are l...

Significance Forage fish provide substantial benefits to both humans and ocean food webs, but these benefits may be in conflict unless there are effective policies governing human activities, such as fishing. Collapses of forage fish induce widespread ecological effects on dependent predators, but attributing collapses to fishing has been difficult...

The reduction of environmental legislation and regulation has become a common practice for governments looking to reduce government overhead while boosting private sector investment. Following this trend, in 2012 Canada enacted major legislative changes to its environmental policies. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA) was overhauled,...

Forage fish support the largest fisheries in the world yet also play key roles in marine food webs as prey for large fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Fishing can thereby have far reaching consequences on marine food webs unless safeguards are in place to avoid depleting forage fish to low levels. Disentangling the contributions of fishing versus...

The oceans absorb approximately 30% of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, causing temperature changes and ocean acidification. However, the realized impact that ocean acidification will have on marine ecosystems remains largely unknown. Here, we adopt a risk-based framework for screening species most likely to be affected by changes in pH based on...

Why sexual reproduction has evolved to be such a widespread mode of reproduction remains a major question in evolutionary biology. Although previous studies have shown that increased sex and recombination can evolve in the presence of host-parasite interactions (the 'Red Queen hypothesis' for sex), many of these studies have assumed that multiple l...