Mark John Costello

Nord University | HIBO · Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture

Observed range shifts of numerous species support predictions of climate change models that species will shift their distribution northward into the Arctic and sub-Arctic seas due to ocean warming. However, how this is affecting overall species richness is unclear. Here we analyze 20,670 scientific research trawls from the North Sea to the Arctic O...

Aquaculture has become the primary supplier of fish for human consumption, with production increasing every year since 1990 (FAO, 2020). At the same time, up to 89% of the world’s capture fisheries are fully exploited, overexploited, or collapsed. While some fisheries may have increased yields due to climate change in the short term, global fisheri...

Species are fundamental biological units, but their discovery and delimitation requires appropriate data and methods. To better circumscribe species, we must improve our species concepts and bolster the underlying data resources necessary to enact them. Here, we provide six prescriptions for better collecting and synergizing our knowledge on specie...

Species are fundamental biological units, but their discovery and delimitation requires appropriate data and methods. To better circumscribe species, we must improve our species concepts and bolster the underlying data resources necessary to enact them. Here, we provide six prescriptions for better collecting and synergizing our knowledge on specie...

The increased availability of environmental data with depth deriving from remote-sensing-based datasets permits more comprehensive modelling of the distribution of marine ecosystems in space and time. This research tests the potential of such objective modelling of marine ecosystems in four dimensions, spatial and temporal, to provide projections o...

Hotspots of tropical marine biodiversity are areas that harbour disproportionately large numbers of species compared to surrounding regions. The richness and location of these hotspots have changed throughout the Cenozoic. Here, we review the global dynamics of Cenozoic tropical marine biodiversity hotspots, including the four major hotspots of the...

Observed range shifts of numerous species support predictions of climate change models that species will shift their distribution northwards into the Arctic and sub-Arctic seas due to ocean warming. However, how this is affecting overall species richness is unclear. Here we analyse scientific research trawl surveys from the North Sea to the Arctic...

Turnover in species composition, also called beta diversity, can indicate natural habitat diversity and fragmentation of populations due to environmental stress, such as heatwaves. Latitudinal gradients in species diversity help synthesise local diversity into more general evolutionary and climatic patterns. Recently it has been shown that local (a...

All aspects of biodiversity research, from taxonomy to conservation, rely on data associated with species names. Effective integration of names across multiple fields is paramount and depends on coordination and organization of taxonomic data. We review current efforts and find that even key applications for well-studied taxa still lack taxonomic e...

The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework currently is under development as part of the Convention of Biodiversity's aim to prevent global biodiversity losses by 2050, but targets can only be effectively developed and assessed if the data used for them are fit for purpose. The monitoring framework has been discussed at length and ensuring appropr...

Assessing and addressing biodiversity needs are of critical and time-sensitive importance, with the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework’s Global Taxonomy Initiative underscoring the need to build capacity in how we conceptualize biodiversity (Abrahamse et al. 2021). Species—as biological units—and their names are the backbone for the data integ...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, emerged in late 2019, halfway through the preparation of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report. This Cross-Chapter Box assesses how the massive shock of the pandemic and response measures interact with climate-related impacts and risks as well as its significan...

Trophic cascades occur when a reduced abundance of a keystone species, such as a top predator, causes changes in their prey abundance, which in turn affects other trophic levels, such as mesopredators, herbivores and/or plants. They are reported from freshwater, terrestrial, and marine environments. This article describes examples of pelagic and be...

Governments are negotiating actions intended to halt biodiversity loss and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. Here, we show that bending the curve for biodiversity is possible, but only if actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner. Connecting these actions to biodiversity outcomes and tracking progress remain a challenge.

As the majority of marine organisms are water-breathing ectotherms, temperature and dissolved oxygen are key environmental variables that influence their fitness and geographic distribution. In line with the temperature-size rule (TSR), marine ectotherms in warmer temperatures will grow to a smaller maximum body size, yet the extent to which differ...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has demonstrated that with daily data informing citizens and governments of the situation, society can respond to a crisis rapidly. We suggest that the current multi-yearly assessments of the, by comparison, chronic crises of climate change and biodiversity loss are no longer fit for purpose. Instead...

As global oceans continue to warm and deoxygenate, it is expected that marine ectotherms will reduce in body size resulting from the interactive effects of temperature and dissolved oxygen availability. A temperature-size response describes how wild populations of ectothermic species grow faster and reach a smaller size within warmer temperatures....

Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urg...

EXPERT INPUT TO THE POST-2020 GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY FRAMEWORK: TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIONS ON ALL DRIVERS OF BIODIVERSITY LOSS ARE URGENTLY REQUIRED TO ACHIEVE THE GLOBAL GOALS BY 2050

Aim Marine forests of brown macroalgae create essential habitats for coastal species and support invaluable ecological services. Here, we provide the first global analysis of species richness and endemicity of both the kelp and fucoid biomes. Location Global. Time period Contemporary. Major taxa studied Marine forests of brown macroalgae, fo...

More than two million accepted species are now listed in the open-access Catalogue of Life . This achievement addresses a major impediment to the management of biodiversity data by presenting an almost complete index of accepted names and known synonyms.

The restoration of biodiversity has become an international priority to reverse its decline. It requires both the protection of biodiversity, especially in areas representative of global biodiversity, and its restoration outside protected areas. This chapter summarizes the range of restoration approaches, from passive methods which end harmful huma...

Because of human impacts, a greater percentage of freshwater species have gone extinct and are threatened with extinction than terrestrial and marine species. These impacts, already underway for over a century, outweigh the predicted impacts of climate change. It is imperative to reverse the effects of freshwater habitat degradation, pollution, wat...

Reported threats to marine species and habitats are reviewed. Fishing, directly and indirectly through bycatch, trophic cascades, and prey depletion, was the dominant impact on vertebrates. Because seabed trawling was a dominant impact on seabed biodiversity, how its reduction is a low cost solution to achieving the Targets and Milestones in the Co...

There is a growing number of classifications that map the ocean into regions. Here, we distinguish those designed for political, management, environmental and biological purposes. A minority are data-driven and based on analysis of numerical or categorical data. Global analyses of marine biogeography, including patterns of species richness and ende...

Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening biodiversity on a global scale. Rich spots of biodiversity, regions with exceptionally high endemism and/or number of species, are a top priority for nature conservation. Terrestrial studies have hypothesized that rich spots occur in places where long-term climate change was dampened relative...

Global prioritisation of where to locate Marine Protected Areas (MPA) has not considered both a comprehensive range of measures of biodiversity as well as threatened species distributions. Using maps of 974 threatened species ranges, we found that areas of high threatened species richness are distributed throughout the world's coastal and continent...

The COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change are global crises. We show how strongly these crises are connected, including the underlying societal inequities and problems of poverty, substandard housing, and infrastructure including clean water supplies. The origins of all these crises are related to modern consumptive industrialisation,...

A consensus among biologists has been growing in recent years for the development of a global list of accepted species (and other taxa). To date, much discussion has focused on visions for how such a list would benefit many scientific and societal disciplines. Less emphasis has been placed on understanding the many technical challenges of compiling...

Species lists are widely used in legislation and regulation to manage and conserve biodiversity. In this paper, we explore the issues caused by the lack of an adequately governed and universally accepted list of the world's species. These include lack of quality control, duplicated effort, conflicts of interest, lack of currency, and confusion in t...

Amphipod crustaceans are an essential component of tropical marine biodiversity. However, their distribution and biogeography have not been analysed in one of the world's largest tropical countries nested in the Coral Triangle, Indonesia. We collected and identified amphipod crustaceans from eight sites in Indonesian waters and combined the results...

Governance is the act of governing or organizing, that is a system of rules, norms, or shared strategies to guide or regulate the actions of the governed. Since the initial development of Linnaean taxonomy, a diversity of approaches have been adopted for critical taxonomic decisions, introducing pluralism to taxonomic principles and resulting in di...

Taxonomy—the delimitation, naming, classification and documentation of species and other taxa—is an often-misunderstood discipline. Complex and at times contested, taxonomy occupies a sometimes discomforting intermediate position on a continuum from descriptive to hypothetico-deductive science. Two aspects of taxonomy that are striking to many obse...

A global consensus list of the world’s species must be based on the best available taxonomic research, and its contents should not be biased towards certain political or social aims. At the same time, users of any global list must be involved or consulted in its establishment to ensure that the list meets their needs. This paper argues that while t...

Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening biodiversity on a global scale. Richspots of biodiversity, regions with exceptionally high endemism and/or number of species, are a top priority for nature conservation. Terrestrial studies have hypothesised that richspots occur in places where long-term climate change was dampened relative t...

Spatial patterns of biodiversity are inextricably linked to their collection methods, yet no synthesis of bias patterns or their consequences exists. As such, views of organismal distribution and the ecosystems they make up may be incorrect, undermining countless ecological and evolutionary studies. Using 742 million records of 374 900 species, we...

http://www.marinespecies.org/introduced

A new data layer provides Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) labels for global coastal segments at 1 km or shorter resolution. These characteristics are summarized for six US Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) sites and one MBON Pole to Pole of the Americas site in Argentina. The global coastlines CMECS classi...

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundr...

The ICES/IUCN-CEM FEG Workshop on Testing OECM Practices and Strategies (WKTOPS) investigated how to evaluate areas with spatial fisheries measures in place as other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) in line with Convention on Biological Diversity definitions, specifically the extent to which area-based fisheries management measure...

Significance We use distribution data on 48,661 species to show that marine biodiversity has been responding to climate warming at a global scale. We show that marine species richness levels off or declines in latitudinal bands with average annual sea surface temperatures exceeding 20 °C. This results in a dip in species richness around the equator...

Climate change affects life at global scales and across systems but is of special concern in areas that are disproportionately rich in biological diversity and uniqueness. Using a meta-analytical approach, we analysed >8000 risk projections of the projected impact of climate change on 273 areas of exceptional biodiversity, including terrestrial and...

The Asia-Pacific Biodiversity Observation Network (APBON) was launched in 2009, in response to the establishment of the Biodiversity Observation Network under the Group on Earth Observations in 2008. APBON's mission is to increase exchange of knowledge and know-how between institutions and researchers concerning biodiversity science research in the...

The observed and expected warming and deoxygenation of ocean water throughout rapid anthropogenic climate change can present deleterious environmental conditions for marine organisms. In turn, as most marine species are thermally-sensitive, water-breathing ectotherms, it is possible that the externalities of climate change paired with persistent fi...

Climate warming constitutes one of the main faces of climate change, and understanding its impacts on marine communities is crucial to predict future community changes and develop sustainable management approaches. This article reviews both the theoretically predicted, and the already reported impacts of warming on marine populations, from changes...

Climate change threatens biodiversity worldwide. Species are already showing impacts of change at individual and community levels, but the risk is predicted to increase even further in the future. Disproportionate impacts are predicted for areas with higher concentration of species or that house a higher proportion of unique species. The risk to th...

Protected areas support healthy ecosystems that are resilient to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, and like healthy people, are more resilient to stress and disease. This article first explains how this resilience arises, the role of the portfolio effect and the protection paradox. Then it outlines how flourishing biodiversity, as can occur i...

A major historical challenge for the management of anthropogenic introductions of species has been the absence of a globally standardised system for species nomenclature. For over a decade, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) has provided a taxonomically authoritative classification and designation of the currently accepted names for all k...

In recent decades, the ocean is becoming less oxygenated due to the combined effect of global warming and the spread of coastal eutrophication, with extensive consequences to marine ecosystems. Past mass extinctions were at least in part due to anoxic conditions in the oceans. Thus, we should be concerned about ongoing and projected declining avail...

Kelp, seaweeds of the order Laminariales, are of ecological and conservation importance because they form undersea forest habitat for many varieties of fauna and flora including mammals, and commercial fish species. In the absence of a world map of the kelp biome, we predicted its potential distribution using geographic records and environment vari...

Latitudinal diversity gradients (LDGs) of species richness in most marine taxa appear to be bimodal with a dip at the equator. We compared LDGs for modeled ranges of 5,619 marine fish species, and distinguished between: all, pelagic, demersal, bony and cartilaginous fish groups; five taxonomic levels of class, order, family, genus and species; and...

Biodiversity keeps our planet stable. Each species, no matter how small, plays an important role in this global balancing act. That’s why the current pace of biodiversity loss is so alarming. Unfortunately, slowing that pace is extremely difficult. Scientists must first take on the virtually impossible task of measuring the richness and variety of...

Lists of species underpin many fields of human endeavour, but there are currently no universally accepted principles for deciding which biological species should be accepted when there are alternative taxonomic treatments (and, by extension, which scientific names should be applied to those species). As improvements in information technology make i...

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Direct observations of marine ecosystems are inherently limited in their temporal scope. Yet, ongoing global anthropogenic change urgently requires improved understanding of long-term baselines, greater insight into the relationship between climate and biodiversity, and knowledge of the evolutionary consequences of our actions. Sediment cores can p...

Significance We discovered that the tropical oceanic diversity depression is not a recent phenomenon nor very deep time in origin by using a comprehensive global dataset of the calcified shells of planktonic foraminifers, abundant unicellular organisms in the world's oceans, which are exceptionally well preserved in marine sediments as fossils. The...

The IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature) World Conservation Congress called for the full protection of 30% of each marine habitat globally and at least 30% of all the ocean. Thus, we quantitatively prioritized the top 30% areas for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) globally using global scale measures of biodiversity from the speci...

Taxonomy is a key to life in not only providing guides to distinguishing species but in opening the door to knowledge about biodiversity. Species names, as the only standardised measure of biodiversity, are essential for communication of information about nature. However, new knowledge means that what we understand a species to be may change over t...

Studying the biogeography of amphipod crustaceans is of interest because they play an important role at lower trophic levels in ecosystems. Because they lack a planktonic larval stage, it has been hypothesized that marine benthic amphipod crustaceans may have short dispersal distances, high endemicity, and spatial turnover in species composition, a...

Biodiversity knowledge shortfalls, especially incomplete information on species distributions, can lead to false conclusions about global biodiversity patterns. Diversity estimation theory statistically uses species occurrence records and sampling completeness (coverage) to predict diversity in terms of species richness, dominance and evenness. We...

We develop a novel class of measures to quantify sample completeness of a biological survey. The class of measures is parameterized by an order q ≥ 0 to control for sensitivity to species relative abundances. When q = 0, species abundances are disregarded and our measure reduces to the conventional measure of completeness, that is, the ratio of the...

Bryozoans are common animals in marine benthic (seabed) ecosystems, and also occur in freshwater rivers, with 6063 and 108 extant species in each environment respectively. There are 17,867 fossil species described. They are distributed across the oceans with a relatively high diversity on the Antarctic shelf. They are colonial suspension filter fee...

We distinguish between concepts used to classify and map geographic areas, with examples from the marine environment. Biomes are large areas dominated by long-lived plants providing habitat for other species. Ecosystems are areas where biological interactions and energy fluxes are greater within the area than with adjacent ecosystems. Realms are de...

The global biogeography of polychaete worms has never been assessed previously. In the present study, we studied the world distribution patterns of polychaetes based on datasets obtained from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System and our recently published checklist of Indonesian polychaete species...

Despite the availability of well-documented data, a comprehensive review of the discovery progress of polychaete worms (Annelida) has never been done. In the present study, we reviewed available data in the World Register of Marine Species, and found that 11,456 valid species of Recent polychaetes (1417 genera, 85 families) have been named by 835 f...

As ocean temperatures rise, species distributions are tracking towards historically cooler regions in line with their thermal affinity1,2. However, different responses of species to warming and changed species interactions make predicting biodiversity redistribution and relative abundance a challenge3,4. Here, we use three decades of fish and plank...