Heather Welch

Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA · Environmental Research Division

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing incurs an annual cost of up to US$25 billion in economic losses, results in substantial losses of aquatic life, and has been linked to human rights violations. Vessel tracking data from the automatic identification system (AIS) are powerful tools for combating IUU, yet AIS transponders can be disab...

In January 2019, the Korean-flagged fishing vessel Oyang 77 sailed south toward international waters off Argentina. The vessel had a known history of nefarious activities, including underreporting its catch and illegally dumping low-value fish to make room in its hold for more lucrative catch. At 2 a.m. on Jan. 10, the Oyang 77 turned off its locat...

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...

Accurate assessments of human-wildlife risk associated with industrial fishing are critical for the conservation of marine top predators. Automatic Identification System (AIS) data provide a means of mapping fishing and estimating human-wildlife risk; however, risk can be obscured by gaps in the AIS record due to technical issues and intentional di...

Describing the sheer scale of the global fishing industry necessitates a lot of zeros: 4,900,000 fishing vessels, 40,000,000 million workers, and an annual production of 80,000,000 tonnes of seafood valued at $141,000,000,000. Effective management of the fishing industry requires crunching these big data—while the human mind balks at such a task, t...

Navigating Our Way reflects the broader insights and diverse voices revolutionizing marine conservation. This volume brings together an array of scholars, practitioners, and experts from multiple fields, creating a network of trans-disciplinary and multi-cultural perspectives to address the complex problems in marine conservation. Larry B. Crowder,...

After the near-complete cessation of commercial whaling, ship collisions have emerged as a primary threat to large whales, but knowledge of collision risk is lacking across most of the world's oceans. We compiled a dataset of 435,000 whale locations to generate global distribution models for four globally ranging species. We then combined >35 billi...

The mobile nature of migratory marine animals across jurisdictional boundaries can challenge the management of biodiversity, particularly under global environmental change. While projections of climate-driven habitat change can reveal whether marine species are predicted to gain or lose habitat in the future, geopolitical boundaries and differing g...

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) have measurable impacts on marine ecosystems and reliant fisheries and associated communities. However, how MHWs translate to changes in fishing opportunities and the displacement of fishing fleets remains poorly understood. Using fishing vessel tracking data from the automatic identification system (AIS), we developed vesse...

Conservation planning traditionally relies upon static reserves; however, there is increasing emphasis on dynamic management (DM) strategies that are flexible in space and time. Due to its novelty, DM lacks best practices to guide design and implementation. We assessed the effect of planning unit size in a DM tool designed to reduce entanglement of...

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...

Forecasting weather has become commonplace, but as society faces novel and uncertain environmental conditions there is a critical need to forecast ecology. Forewarning of ecosystem conditions during climate extremes can support proactive decision-making, yet applications of ecological forecasts are still limited. We showcase the capacity for existi...

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...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-09-08/climate-change-oceans-heatwave-marine-endangered-species-whales-fish

The Northwest Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico are among the fastest warming ocean regions, a trend that is expected to continue through this century with far-reaching implications for marine ecosystems. We examine the distribution of 12 highly migratory top predator species using predictive models and project expected habitat changes using downsc...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are becoming an important tool for marine conservation and management. Yet while there is an increasing diversity and volume of marine biodiversity data for training SDMs, little practical guidance is available on how to leverage distinct data types to build robust models. We explored the effect of different data...

Machine learning covers a large set of algorithms that can be trained to identify patterns in data. Thanks to increases in the amounts of data and computing power available, it has become pervasive across scientific disciplines. We first highlight why machine learning is needed in marine ecology. Then we provide a quick primer on machine learning t...

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...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are becoming an important tool for marine conservation and management. Yet while there is an increasing diversity and volume of marine biodiversity data for training SDMs, little practical guidance is available on how to leverage distinct data types to build robust models. We explored the effect of different data...

Importance Although UV radiation exposure is the conventionally reported risk factor for cutaneous melanoma, an alternative exposure is diagnostic scrutiny: the more physicians look for and biopsy moles, the more melanoma they find. Objective To assess the association of proxies for UV radiation exposure and diagnostic scrutiny with geographical p...

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...

With accelerating climate variability and change, novel approaches are needed to warn managers of changing ecosystem state and to identify appropriate management actions. One strategy is using indicator species—like seabirds as ecosystem sentinels—to monitor changes in marine environments. Here, we explore the utility of western gulls (Larus occide...

Earth‐observing satellites are a major research tool for spatially explicit ecosystem nowcasting and forecasting. However, there are practical challenges when integrating satellite data into usable real‐time products for stakeholders. The need of forecast immediacy and accuracy means that forecast systems must account for missing data and data late...

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...

Background Habitat suitability models give insight into the ecological drivers of species distributions and are increasingly common in management and conservation planning. Telemetry data can be used in habitat models to describe where animals were present, however this requires the use of presence-only modeling approaches or the generation of ‘pse...

Interview on dynamic management in Earth Island Journal

Satellite remote sensing data are critical for assessing ecosystem state and evaluating long-term trends and shifts in ecosystem components. Many operational tools rely on continuous streams of remote sensing data, and when a satellite sensor reaches the end of its designed lifespan, these tools must be transferred to a more reliable data stream. T...

Wild-capture fisheries help provide food security to billions of people, yet bycatch of non-target species threatens ecosystem health and fishery sustainability. Appropriate monitoring and fisheries management can mitigate bycatch but require standardized bycatch data to be robustly recorded and effectively disseminated. Here we integrated and anal...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are important management tools for highly mobile marine species because they provide spatially and temporally explicit information on animal distribution. Two prevalent modeling frameworks used to develop SDMs for marine species are generalized additive models (GAMs) and boosted regression trees (BRTs), but compar...

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...

Spatial management is a valuable strategy to advance regional goals for nature conservation, economic development, and human health. One challenge of spatial management is navigating the prioritization of multiple features. This challenge becomes more pronounced in dynamic management scenarios, in which boundaries are flexible in space and time in...

Interview with OCTO's The Skimmer. https://meam.openchannels.org/news/skimmer-marine-ecosystems-and-management/new-tools-dynamic-ocean-management-ecocast-vs-marxan

Climate change is causing range shifts in many marine species, with implications for biodiversity and fisheries. Previous research has mainly focused on how species' ranges will respond to changing ocean temperatures, without accounting for other environmental covariates that could affect future distribution patterns. Here, we integrate habitat sui...

An op-ed in the LA Times on California's Loggerhead Conservation Area https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-welch-sea-turtles-swordfish-climate-change-20190610-story.html

Aim Advances in ecological and environmental modelling offer new opportunities for estimating dynamic habitat suitability for highly mobile species and supporting management strategies at relevant spatiotemporal scales. We used an ensemble modelling approach to predict daily, year‐round habitat suitability for a migratory species, the blue whale (B...

Aim Animal tracking can provide unique insights into the ecology and conservation of marine species, such as the partitioning of habitat, including differences between life history stages or sexes, and can inform fisheries stock assessments, bycatch reduction and spatial management such as dynamic management. Location Northeast Pacific Ocean. Met...

Code library to make operational EcoCast - a dynamic ocean management tool for fisheries bycatch

In 2003, NOAA Fisheries (the US federal fisheries agency) established the Loggerhead Conservation Area-a seasonal fisheries closure off southern California that is enacted for months between June and August when El Niño conditions are declared or forecasted to occur, or simply when sea surface temperatures are warmer than normal. Since its establis...

Static protected areas may not be able to fully protect highly mobile marine animals such as turtles and other pelagic species. In order to improve protection of these species, dynamic management strategies can use ecological forecasts to follow species’ predicted habitats in real-time. By borrowing concepts from established physical forecasts like...

Extreme climatic events are expected to become more frequent under current conditions of increasing global temperatures and climate variability. A key challenge of fisheries management is understanding and planning for the effect of anomalous oceanic conditions on the distributions of protected species and their interactions with fishing gear. Atyp...

Dynamic management (DM) is a novel approach to spatial management that aligns scales of environmental variability, animal movement and human uses. While static approaches to spatial management rely on one‐time assessments of biological, environmental, economic, and/or social conditions, dynamic approaches repeatedly assess conditions to produce reg...

Do you check the weather forecast before getting dressed in the morning? If you do, then you're making a decision in real time, based on dynamic processes that can vary greatly over space and time. Marine animals can be similarly dynamic. They might move in response to constantly shifting ocean conditions, like currents and fronts. That led us to w...

Species distribution models (SDMs) have become key tools for describing and predicting species habitats. In the marine domain, environmental data used in modeling species distributions are often remotely sensed, and as such have limited capacity for interpreting the vertical structure of the water column, or are sampled in situ, offering minimal sp...

A piece written for The Conversation on designing marine protected areas that can accommodate highly mobile species. https://theconversation.com/to-conserve-ocean-life-marine-reserves-need-to-protect-species-that-move-around-89907

Seafood is an essential source of protein for more than 3 billion people worldwide, yet bycatch of threatened species in capture fisheries remains a major impediment to fisheries sustainability. Management measures designed to reduce bycatch often result in significant economic losses and even fisheries closures. Static spatial management approache...

The U.S Department of Interior, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued leases in eight Wind Energy Areas (WEA) along the Northwest Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) from Massachusetts to North Carolina, encompassing >7,000 square km of seafloor for offshore renewable energy (ORE) development. While BOEM is responsible for regulati...

Dynamic Management (DM) is an emergent approach in which spatial boundaries and management recommendations are flexible in space and time. Although a number of operational examples of DM exist, challenges with DM operationalization can be prohibitive. To facilitate the operationalization of DM tools, we lay out a transparent, start-to-finish framew...

Bycatch constitutes a waste of natural resources and significant economic loss to fisheries. Moreover, bycatch can have an impact on species by reducing population sizes, and an ecosystem-level impact through the significant removal of biomass and subsequent trophic changes. In this regard, it is crucial to refine methods for quantifying interactio...

Our oceans support an incredible diversity of marine life, from microscopic organisms such as plankton to megafauna such as blue whales. But threats like climate change, fishing and offshore oil and gas development are stressing marine life and degrading ocean health. To help protect marine life, the United States has a network of over 1,600 marine...

Spatial management of the highly dynamic pelagic realm, and the highly mobile species it supports, requires dynamic processes to be incorporated into reserve design. To achieve this, planners need information on how these processes vary across space and time, and how this variation relates to species of conservation interest. This study presents a...