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105
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Introduction
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January 2011 - present
Publications
Publications (105)
A key challenge in planning long-term fisheries sustainability is overcoming uncertainties in predicted changes in target populations and catch rates in response to climate change and fishery trends. We combine transdisciplinary knowledge co-production and qualitative network modelling to advance system understanding and elucidate likely responses...
Terrestrially breeding marine predators have experienced shifts in species distribution, prey availability, breeding phenology, and population dynamics due to climate change worldwide. These central-place foragers are restricted within proximity of their breeding colonies during the breeding season, making them highly susceptible to any changes in...
Marine monitoring efforts are increasingly supported by opportunistic shipboard surveys. However, opportunistic survey methods often require adaptation to suit the vessel and the operations being conducted onboard. Whilst best-practice techniques for surveying marine wildlife on vessels of opportunity are yet to be established, testing and developm...
Southern Ocean organisms are uniquely adapted to the extreme environmental conditions that characterise this region, making them especially vulnerable to climate change. Alterations to the physical environment have already been linked to alterations in the structure and functioning of entire ecosystems, and ecological disruptions are expected to co...
Plain Language Summary
Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) originates primarily from nutrient‐rich deep waters upwelled around Antarctica. AABW spends a relatively brief time at the sea surface, thus being exposed to comparatively little light energy and leaving a considerable amount of nutrients unused by photosynthetic carbon fixation. If more of these...
The relationships between flying Antarctic seabirds and their at-sea environments remain poorly understood, particularly outside of the breeding season. Improving our knowledge of how these marine predators use their habitat is a critical step towards conservation of these species. We tracked 27 adult Snow Petrels from two large breeding colonies i...
You can listen to a summary of this paper in podcast form courtesy of Google's NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/f9eace65-6f9c-4a55-87c9-28f698011b2f/audio.
Southern Ocean organisms are uniquely adapted to the extreme environmental conditions that characterise this region, making them especially vulnerable to climate change. Alter...
In 2017, the United Nations proclaimed a Decade of
Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (hereafter
referred to as the UN Ocean Decade) from 2021 until
2030 to support efforts to reverse the cycle of decline in
ocean health. To achieve this ambitious goal, this initiative
aims to gather ocean stakeholders worldwide behind a
common framework tha...
Public engagement on climate change is a vital concern for both science and society. Despite more people engaging with climate change science today, there remains a high-level contestation in the public sphere regarding scientific credibility and identifying information needs, interests, and concerns of the non-technical public. In this paper, we p...
The Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian sector of the Southern Ocean is a highly dynamic region for Southern Ocean ecosystems and an important region for the Patagonian toothfish fishery. Fished regions overlap with foraging regions for predators; however, no study has explored the spatial impacts of fishing on ecosystem dynamics. We developed two spat...
Proactive and coordinated action to mitigate and adapt to climate change will be essential for achieving the healthy, resilient, safe, sustainably harvested and biodiverse ocean that the UN Decade of Ocean Science and sustainable development goals (SDGs) seek. Ocean-based mitigation actions could contribute 12% of the emissions reductions required...
Antarctic krill are a key Southern Ocean species whose success is attributed to their adaption to the extreme polar seasonality. Overwinter sea-ice presence and characteristics exert a strong control on larval survival and subsequent recruitment. Our understanding of the mechanisms through which sea ice influences survival are mainly underpinned by...
Aim
Climate change will likely lead to a significant redistribution of biodiversity in marine ecosystems. We examine the potential redistribution of a community of marine predators by comparing current and future habitat distribution projections. We examine relative changes among species, indicative of potential future community-level changes and c...
Climate change alters the extent and structure of sea-ice environments, which affects how they function as a habitat for polar species. Identifying sea-ice characteristics that serve as indicators of habitat quality will be crucial to the monitoring and management of climate change impacts. In the Southern Ocean, Antarctic krill is a key prey speci...
Southern Ocean ecosystems are globally important. Processes in the Antarctic atmosphere, cryosphere, and the Southern Ocean directly influence global atmospheric and oceanic systems. Southern Ocean biogeochemistry has also been shown to have global importance. In contrast, ocean ecological processes are often seen as largely separate from the rest...
Plain Language Summary
Antarctic krill (krill) are a key prey item for many Southern Ocean marine predators and also support an expanding commercial fishery. However, there is a need to identify areas of the Southern Ocean that are best for both the production of eggs, and subsequent survival until free‐swimming larvae. We create a model for spawni...
Improved public understanding of the ocean and the importance of sustainable ocean use, or ocean literacy, is essential for achieving global commitments to sustainable development by 2030 and beyond. However, growing human populations (particularly in mega-cities), urbanisation and socio-economic disparity threaten opportunities for people to engag...
Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are prolonged extreme oceanic warm water events. Globally, the frequency and intensity of MHWs have been increasing in recent years, and it is expected that this trend is reflected in the Kerguelen Plateau region. MHWs can negatively impact the structure of marine biodiversity, marine ecosystems, and commercial fisheries. Co...
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Globally, the increasing impacts of climate change can evoke feelings of overwhelm and helplessness. Many people feel ill equipped to fully perceive or take action against our changing climate. Here, we reflect upon the Curious Climate Tasmania project and demonstrate how innovative, collaborative communication can more effectively engage non-scien...
Understanding the impacts of climate and fishing on marine systems is important for ecosystem-based management in the Southern Ocean, but can be difficult to evaluate due to patchy data in space and time. We developed the first time-dynamic food web model for the Kerguelen Plateau using Ecopath with Ecosim to explore likely drivers of change in thi...
Understanding the impacts of climate and fishing on marine systems is important for ecosystem-based management in the Southern Ocean, but can be difficult to evaluate due to patchy data in space and time. We developed the first time-dynamic food web model for the Kerguelen Plateau using Ecopath with Ecosim to explore likely drivers of change in thi...
Antarctic krill is a key species of important Southern Ocean food webs, yet how changes in ocean temperature and primary production may impact their habitat quality remains poorly understood. We provide a circumpolar assessment of the robustness of krill growth habitat to climate change by coupling an empirical krill growth model with projections f...
The Southern Ocean ecosystem is thought to be experiencing a long-term increase in Salpa thompsoni. Uncertainty surrounds the environmental drivers behind variable S. thompsoni abundances, particularly within the East Antarctic region. In this study, S. thompsoni populations were sampled in the Indian Sector of the Southern Ocean, as part of the Ja...
Annual phytoplankton blooms on the northern region of the Kerguelen Plateau fuel a productive food web that supports highly valuable commercial fisheries for Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) and mackerel icefish (Champsocephalus gunnari). The food web on the plateau is understudied in comparison to other regions of the Southern Ocean...
Biophysical interactions are influential in determining the scale of key ecological processes within marine ecosystems. For oceanic predators, this means foraging behaviour is influenced by processes shaping the distribution of prey. However, oceanic prey is difficult to observe and its abundance and distribution is regionally generalised. We use a...
Southern Ocean ecosystems are under pressure from resource exploitation and climate change1,2. Mitigation requires the identification and protection of Areas of Ecological Significance (AESs), which have so far not been determined at the ocean-basin scale. Here, using assemblage-level tracking of marine predators, we identify AESs for this globally...
Mesopelagic fish and squid occupy ocean depths extending below the photic zone and their vertical migrations represent a massive pathway moving energy and carbon through the water column. Their spatio-temporal distribution is however, difficult to map across remote regions particularly the vast Southern Ocean. This represents a key gap in understan...
Ecosystem models are useful tools for making informed management decisions regarding the potential effects of environmental change and fishing activity on Southern Ocean ecosystems. Recent work has successfully updated an existing Ecopath model for the Kerguelen exclusive economic zone from an unbalanced to a balanced model state (where energy inpu...
http://heardisland.antarctica.gov.au/research/kerguelen-plateau-symposium/the-kerguelen-plateau-marine-ecosystems-and-fisheries
Sudden losses to food production (that is, shocks) and their consequences across land and sea pose cumulative threats to global sustainability. We conducted an integrated assessment of global production data from crop, livestock, aquaculture and fisheries sectors over 53 years to understand how shocks occurring in one food sector can create diverse...
Sea ice retreat is a key event affecting Southern Ocean ecosystems during spring and summer. The impacts of this change can be seen in these ecosystems from primary producers to top predators, through biological, chemical and physical systems. We apply a Lagrangian particle tracking method to investigate transport processes from the retreating sea...
Oceanographic observations from ships, floats and remote sensing are used to describe the ocean circulation and frontal structure from the southern Kerguelen Plateau to the Antarctic margin. The flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is largely zonal upstream of the Kerguelen Plateau. The southern branch of the Polar Front and the northern...
Higher trophic-level species are an integral component of any marine ecosystem. Despite their importance, methods for representing these species in end-to-end ecosystem models often have limited representation of life histories, energetics and behaviour. We built an individual-based model coupled with a dynamic energy budget for female southern ele...
Life table of southern elephant seals at Macquarie Island.
Comparison of survival rates and relative numbers of males and female southern elephant seals on Macquarie Island derived from capture-mark-recapture studies. Hot-iron brands were used to individually and permanently mark seals. A combination, alpha-numeric brand was applied in different or...
Increasing concern about the impacts of climate change on ecosystems is prompting ecologists and ecosystem managers to seek reliable projections of physical drivers of change. The use of global climate models in ecology is growing, although drawing ecologically meaningful conclusions can be problematic. The expertise required to access and interpre...
Antarctic coastal polynyas are persistent open water areas in the sea ice zone, and regions of high biological productivity thought to be important foraging habitat for marine predators. This study quantified southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) habitat use within and around the polynyas of the Prydz Bay region (63°E– 88°E) in East Antarctica,...
Animation of the annual temperature within Mackenzie polynya transect.
(MP4)
Animation of the annual temperature within West Ice Shelf polynya transect.
(MP4)
Seal-based CTD observations within polynyas.
(DOCX)
Animation of the annual temperature within Cape Darnley polynya transect.
(MP4)
Regional Ocean Modelling System animation text.
(DOCX)
Animation of the annual sea-surface temperature within the Prydz Bay region.
(MP4)
Animation of the annual temperature within Prydz Bay polynya transect.
(MP4)
ROMS polynya time-series.
(DOCX)
Supplementary statistics supporting model development.
(DOCX)
Seabirds and marine mammals are generally not well represented in marine ecosystem models, despite the important roles that these groups play in determining ecosystem dynamics. This is an important gap in model development, particularly for end-to-end ecosystem models, which are becoming increasingly important tools for fisheries and ecosystem base...
Climate change has the potential to significantly alter the characteristics of high-intensity, short-duration rainfall events, potentially leading to more severe and more frequent flash floods. Research has shown that future changes to such events could far exceed expectations based on temperature scaling and basic physical principles alone, but th...
Policy-and decision-makers require assessments of status and trends for marine species, habitats, and ecosystems to understand if human activities in the marine environment are sustainable, particularly in the face of global change. Central to many assessments are statistical and dynamical models of populations, communities, ecosystems, and their s...
Understanding patterns of oceanic transport and their role in population connectivity, particularly for the early life stages of marine organisms, has important implications for population biology and management. Various approaches have been used to observe and model larval transport and recruitment in marine environments. In the Southern Ocean, th...
Over-wintering of larvae underneath Antarctic pack ice is a critical stage in the life-cycle of Antarctic krill. However, there are no circumpolar assessments of available habitat for larval krill, making it difficult to evaluate how climate change may impact this life stage. We use outputs from a circumpolar sea-ice model, together with a set of s...
This report will help the Tasmanian community be better prepared for, respond to and recover from natural disasters through an updated understanding and awareness of the natural hazards that have the most potential to
impact the State.
The information contained in this report, including the risk register and risk treatment options together with th...
This report will help the Tasmanian community be better prepared for, respond to and recover from natural
disasters through an updated understanding and awareness of the natural hazards that have the most
potential to impact the State.
The information contained in this summary report, together with the risk register and risk treatment
options prov...
Southeastern Australia is a ‘hotspot’ for oceanographic change. Here, rapidly increasing sea surface temperatures, rising at more than double the global trend, are largely associated with a southerly extension of the East Australian Current (EAC) and its eddy field. Maria Island, situated at the southern end of the EAC extension at 42°S, 148°E, has...
Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the subsequent changes to ocean chemistry may have pronounced effects on marine microbial communities, particularly for the cold Southern Ocean. Changes to the microbial community in this region could affect the way nutrients are cycled, impact the efficiency of carbon drawdown, and cause shifts in food sup...
An important challenge for understanding and managing marine ecosystems is determining the relationship between the distributions of prey species and foraging of top predators. We examined the diet and foraging dynamics of breeding macaroni penguins (Eudyptes chrysolophus) from sub-Antarctic Heard Island, and related these to prey distributions der...
We describe the method and performance of a bias‐correction applied to high‐resolution (˜10 km) simulations from a stretched‐grid Regional Climate Model ( RCM ) over Tasmania, Australia. The bias‐correction is a quantile mapping of empirical cumulative frequency distributions. Corrections are applied at a daily time step to five variables: rainfall...
Antarctic and Southern Ocean (ASO) marine ecosystems have been changing for at least the last 30 years, including in response to increasing ocean temperatures and changes in the extent and seasonality of sea ice; the magnitude and direction of these changes differ between regions around Antarctica that could see populations of the same species chan...
The ability of an ensemble of six GCMs, downscaled to a 0.1° lat/lon grid using the Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model over Tasmania, Australia, to simulate observed extreme temperature and precipitation climatologies and statewide trends is assessed for 1961–2009 using a suite of extreme indices. The downscaled simulations have high skill in reprod...
[1] In this study we develop methods for dynamically downscaling output from six general circulation models (GCMs) for two emissions scenarios using a variable-resolution atmospheric climate model. The use of multiple GCMs and emissions scenarios gives an estimate of model range in projected changes to the mean climate across the region. By modelin...
Coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation models (GCMs) lack sufficient resolution to model the regional detail of changes to mean circulation and rainfall with projected climate warming. In this paper, changes in mean circulation and rainfall in GCMs are compared to those in a variable resolution regional climate model, the Conformal Cubic Atmo...
Changes to streamflows caused by climate change may have major impacts on the management of water for hydro-electricity generation and agriculture in Tasmania, Australia. We describe changes to Tasmanian surface water availability from 1961–1990 to 2070–2099 using high-resolution simulations. Six fine-scale (∼10 km<sup>2</sup>) simulations of daily...
Changes to streamflows caused by climate change may have major impacts on the management of water for hydro-electric generation and agriculture in Tasmania, Australia. We present high-resolution projections of Tasmanian surface water availability between 1961–1990 and 2070–2099. Six fine-scale (10 km) simulations of daily rainfall and potential eva...