Timothy E Essington

University of Washington | UW · School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences

Understanding the dynamic relationship between marine species and their changing environments is critical for ecosystem based management, particularly as coastal ecosystems experience rapid change (e.g., general warming, marine heat waves). In this paper, we present a novel statistical approach to robustly estimate and track the thermal niches of 3...

As climate change reshapes marine ecosystems, the dynamics of fish stocks are undergoing rapid transformation. Understanding these shifts and their multifaceted impacts demands more than just scientific inquiry; it necessitates a fusion of knowledge, collaboration, and action. However, the translation of cutting-edge research on the changing distri...

Ocean warming interacts with local stressors to negatively affect coral reefs. The adaptive capacity of reefs to survive these stressors is driven by ecological and evolutionary processes occurring at multiple spatial scales. Marine protected area (MPA) networks are one solution that can address both local and regional threats, yet the impacts of M...

Species’ ranges are shifting in response to increasing temperature and decreasing oxygen in coastal oceans. Forecasting these shifts is limited by information on physiological oxygen thresholds and how they depend on temperature. Here, we adopt an ecophysiological metric, the metabolic index, and estimate its parameters from data collected on marin...

Understanding the dynamic relationship between marine species and their changing environments is critical for ecosystem based management, particularly as coastal ecosystems experience rapid change (e.g., general warming, marine heat waves). In this paper, we present a novel statistical approach to robustly estimate and track the thermal niches of 3...

Pacific herring ( Clupea pallasii ) is a foundational species in Puget Sound (Washington State, U.S.A.) and is subject to many anthropogenic threats. We assessed the overall status of the Puget Sound Pacific herring sub-stock complex and asked whether watersheds with less urban or agricultural land cover, less impervious surface, and lower human de...

Ecological analyses typically involve many interacting variables. Ecologists often specify lagged interactions in community dynamics (i.e. vector‐autoregressive models) or simultaneous interactions (e.g. structural equation models), but there is less familiarity with dynamic structural equation models (DSEM) that can include any simultaneous or lag...

Environmental conditions can create spatial and temporal variability in growth and distribution processes, yet contemporary stock assessment methods often do not explicitly address the consequences of these patterns. For example, stock assessments often assume that body weight-at-age (i.e. size) is constant across the stocks’ range, and may thereby...

Ecologists and fisheries scientists are faced with forecasting the ecological responses of non-stationary processes resulting from climate change and other drivers. While much is known about temporal change, and resulting responses vis-à-vis species distributional shifts, less is known about how spatial variability in population structure changes t...

To facilitate evolutionary adaptation to climate change, we must protect networks of coral reefs that span a range of environmental conditions — not just apparent ‘refugia’.

Although species distribution models (SDMs) are commonly used to hindcast fine‐scale population metrics, there remains a paucity of information about how well these models predict future responses to climate. Many conventional SDMs rely on spatially‐explicit but time‐invariant conditions to quantify species distributions and densities. We compared...

Interest is growing in developing conservation strategies to restore and maintain coral reef ecosystems in the face of mounting anthropogenic stressors, particularly climate warming and associated mass bleaching events. One such approach is to propagate coral colonies ex situ and transplant them to degraded reef areas to augment habitat for reef‐de...

A major challenge in sustainability science is identifying targets that maximize ecosystem benefits to humanity while minimizing the risk of crossing critical system thresholds. One critical threshold is the biomass at which populations become so depleted that their population growth rates become negative—depensation. Here, we evaluate how the valu...

The rapid pace of ocean change has prompted a need to forecast likely future species distributions. Species distribution models are often categorized as either correlative (statistical) or mechanistic, and each has limitations both for advancing understanding and for prediction. Here we sought to benefit from mechanistic understanding of how and wh...

The use of species distribution models (SDMs) has rapidly increased over the last decade, driven largely by increasing observational evidence of distributional shifts of terrestrial and aquatic populations. These models permit, for example, the quantification of range shifts, the estimation of species co-occurrence, and the association of habitat t...

There is a paucity of age data for chondrichthyan fishes owing, in large part, to limitations in traditional age estimation methods. Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy has shown promise as an alternative, more efficient method for acquiring age data from chondrichthyans. However, studies are limited to sharks in the southern hemi...

Fisheries for forage fish may affect the survival and reproduction of piscivorous predators, especially seabirds. However, seabirds have evolved life history strategies to cope with natural fluctuations in prey and it is difficult to separate effects of fishing on seabirds from impacts of natural variability. To date, potential impacts of forage fi...

Global environmental change is challenging species with novel conditions, such that demographic and evolutionary trajectories of populations are often shaped by the exchange of organisms and alleles across landscapes. Current ecological theory predicts that random networks with dispersal shortcuts connecting distant sites can promote persistence wh...

Corals are experiencing unprecedented decline from climate change-induced mass bleaching events. Dispersal not only contributes to coral reef persistence through demographic rescue but can also hinder or facilitate evolutionary adaptation. Locations of reefs that are likely to survive future warming therefore remain largely unknown, particularly wi...

Nearshore areas represent important habitats for many species, at least for part of their life cycle. Therefore, modeling and mapping nearshore habitats is essential for natural resource management and conservation, such as determining potential impacts to marine populations and their habitats from human activities and identifying conservation meas...

Diet-based annual biomass indices can potentially use predator stomach contents to provide information about prey biomass and may be particularly useful for species that are otherwise poorly sampled, including ecologically important forage fishes. However, diet-based biomass indices may be sensitive to underlying ecological dynamics between predato...

Corals are experiencing unprecedented decline from climate change-induced mass bleaching events. Dispersal not only contributes to coral reef persistence through demographic rescue but can also hinder or facilitate evolutionary adaptation. Locations of reefs that are likely to survive future warming therefore remain largely unknown, particularly wi...

Recent observations of record low winter sea-ice coverage and warming water temperatures in the eastern Bering Sea have signaled the potential impacts of climate change on this ecosystem, which have implications for commercial fisheries production. We investigate the impacts of forecasted climate change on the eastern Bering Sea food web through th...

Median timing of reproduction in salmonid populations is generally consistent among years, reflecting long-term patterns of natural selection from characteristics of the local environment. However, altered selection from factors related to climate change or human intervention might shift timing over generations, with implications for the population...

In coastal marine ecosystems, the depletion of dissolved oxygen can cause behavioral and distributional shifts of organisms and thereby alter ecological processes. We used the spatiotemporal variation in the onset and intensity of low dissolved oxygen in Hood Canal, Washington, USA, to investigate consequences of seasonally reduced oxygen on fish–z...

Asynchronous fluctuations in abundance between species with similar ecological roles can stabilize food webs and support coexistence. Sardine (Sardinops spp.) and anchovy (Engraulis spp.) have long been used as an example of this pattern because low-frequency variation in catches of these species appears to occur out of phase, suggesting that fishe...

Structured, systematic processes for decision-making can facilitate implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM). In US fisheries management, existing fishery ecosystem plans (FEPs) are primarily descriptive documents — not action-oriented planning processes. “Next-generation” FEPs extend existing FEPs by translating ecosystem prin...

Significance Recent recoveries of marine mammal populations worldwide have heightened concerns for their potential impacts on global fisheries. While predator-induced reductions in prey abundance have been documented, trait-mediated changes in life-history characteristics are rarely considered. Here we provide a striking example of the impact of a...

Recreational fisheries are valued at $190B globally and constitute the predominant way in which people use wild fish stocks in developed countries, with inland systems contributing the main fraction of recreational fisheries. Although inland recreational fisheries are thought to be highly resilient and self-regulating, the rapid pace of environment...

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...

Ecosystems around the world are reorganizing due to climate change¹, motivating management responses to facilitate species persistence and maintain ecological functions. Spatial management actions are generally undertaken to relieve local stressors on populations and have recently been suggested as an approach to facilitate species range shifts, pr...

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...

It is broadly assumed that organisms inhabiting seasonally hypoxic estuaries and fjords are stressed by low dissolved oxygen (DO) conditions. However, relatively few zooplankton have shown clear avoidance of hypoxic water except when oxygen was extremely low. We investigated vertical distributions and abundance of the euphausiid Euphausia pacifica...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043765.].

Funding received by RH during the 5 years prior to publication of this article. (XLSX)

The appetite for ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) approaches has grown, but the perception persists that implementation is slow. Here, we synthesize progress toward implementing EBFM in the United States through one potential avenue: expanding fish stock assessments to include ecosystem considerations and interactions between species, fl...

Understanding population fluctuations is a major goal of population ecology. In unpredictable marine environments, population variation is thought to be caused primarily by varying survival rates through a critical early life‐history stage. However, there is increasing evidence that somatic growth variation is common and causes population fluctuati...

Ecosystem‐based fishery management requires considering the effects of actions on social, natural and economic systems. These considerations are important for forage fish fisheries, because these species provide ecosystem services as a key prey in food webs and support valuable commercial fisheries. Forage fish stocks fluctuate naturally, and fishi...

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...

The Salish Sea Pacific Herring Assessment and Management Strategy Team. 2018. Assessment and Management of Pacific Herring in the Salish Sea: Conserving and Recovering a Culturally Significant and Ecologically Critical Component of the Food Web. The SeaDoc Society, Orcas Island, WA. 74 pp.

To advance conservation and management of Pacific herring in the Salish Sea, an Assessment and Management Strategy Team (the Team) was convened, composed of representatives from government agencies from Washington and BC; social and natural scientists from universities, First Nations, and Tribes; and other stakeholders. The Team performed an expert...

Aquaculture is supporting demand and surpassing wild-caught seafood. Yet, most fed aquaculture species (finfish and crustacea) rely on wild-captured forage fish for essential fatty acids and micronutrients, an important but limited resource. As the fastest growing food sector in the world, fed aquaculture demand will eventually surpass ecological s...

U.S. fisheries management has made tremendous strides under the current management framework, which centers on single stocks rather than ecosystems. However, conventional management focuses on one fishing sector at a time, considers a narrow range of issues, and is separated into individual fishery management plans often leaving little opportunity...

We develop a multi-model approach to explore how abundance of a forage fish (Pacific sardine Sardinops sagax) impacts the ecosystem and predators in the California Current, a region where sardine and anchovy Engraulis mordax have recently declined to less than 10% of contemporary peak abundances. We developed or improved applications of three ecosy...

Predation can play an important role in population, community and ecosystem processes. When predator guilds are diverse, fluctuations in individual predator populations may have small influences on the guild at large, suggesting that predator diversity stabilizes the amount of predation prey experience. The strength of this phenomenon depends on ho...

Ecosystem approaches to natural resource management are seen as a way to provide better outcomes for ecosystems and for people, yet the nature and strength of interactions among ecosystem components is usually unknown. Here we characterize the economic benefits of ecological knowledge through a simple model of fisheries that target a predator (pisc...

Forage fish undergo dramatic changes in abundance through time. Long-term fluctuations, which have historically been attributed to changes in recruitment, may also be due to changes in adult mortality. Pacific herring, a lightly exploited forage fish in Puget Sound, WA, have exhibited shifts in age structure and decreases in spawning biomass during...

Forage fish generate economic benefits through directed fisheries, but also generate benefits through their role as prey to other valued species (large piscivorous fish, seabirds, and marine mammals). Previous evaluations of the ecosystem consequences of forage fish fisheries used models with coarse taxonomic resolution of forage fish and their pre...

Forage fish are a vital part of marine ecosystems, partly by supporting some of the largest fisheries worldwide, but also due to their role in food webs as prey for larger fish and other predators. One of the unresolved questions about forage fish dynamics is the causes of their significant temporal fluctuations. These fluctuations are often attrib...

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...

Researchers have long recognized the importance of ecological differences at the species level in structuring natural communities yet until recently have often overlooked the influence of intraspecific trait variation, which can profoundly alter community dynamics [1]. Human extraction of living resources can reduce intraspecific trait variation by...

Despite evidence that mobile bottom fishing gear causes physical damage to habitat-forming organisms on the seafloor, likely indirectly affecting associated fishes, it is difficult to determine how conservation and management policies influence such effects because researchers do not typically systematically quantify the extent and intensity of gea...

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...

Resource managers and policy makers have long recognized the importance of considering fisheries in the context of ecosystems; yet, movement towards widespread Ecosystem-based Fisheries Management (EBFM) has been slow. A conceptual reframing of fisheries management is occurring globally, which envisions fisheries as systems with interacting biophys...

Management strategies for fisheries typically do not account for environmental stressors, such as hypoxia (dissolved oxygen < 2 mg·L⁻¹). Hypoxia can lead to shoaling of organisms into normoxic habitats, enhancing catchability, which could reduce the performance of fishery management strategies. Here, we conducted a management strategy evaluation of...

Marine fisheries science is a broad field that is fundamentally concerned with sustainability across ecological, economic, and social dimensions. Ensuring the delivery of food, security, equity, and well-being while sustaining ecosystems in the face of rapid change is, by far, the main challenge facing marine fisheries. A tighter integration of mod...

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...

Hypoxia can cause significant disturbances in aquatic ecosystems, but the impacts of moderately low dissolved oxygen (DO) where physiological tolerance levels vary among orga - nisms and likely have consequences for key food web linkages are not well understood. We hypo - thesized that the greater sensitivity of fish to DO, compared with their zoop...

An ecosystem approach to forage fish management is required because forage fish support large fisheries, are prey for many valued species in marine food webs, and provide important social and cultural benefits to humans. Complex ecosystem models are often used to evaluate potential ecosystem consequences of forage fish fisheries, but there is seldo...

Understanding the role of forage fish in marine food webs is an important part of ecosystem-based fisheries management. Food web models are a common tool used to account for important characteristics of forage fish and their trophodynamics. One primary limitation of many existing food web models is that the taxonomic resolution of forage fish and t...

Stomach content data are frequently used to characterize predator feeding habits, often by describing the proportional contribution by mass or number of each prey type (diet fractions). These data pose several statistical challenges for analysis and estimation that have hindered our ability to create quantitative diet fraction estimates from stomac...

Understanding the role of forage fish in marine food webs is an important part of ecosystem-based fisheries management. Food web models are a common tool used to account for important characteristics of forage fish and their trophodynamics. One primary limitation of many existing food web models is that the taxonomic resolution of forage fish and t...

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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Although ecosystem-based fisheries management is often associated with trade-offs between conflicting demands for ecosystem services, the holistic ecological considerations the approach promotes may sometimes lead to novel solutions that benefit both conservation and fisheries. Directed fishing on large piscivorous fish can reduce predation on prey...

Individual quota (IQ) management systems in commercial marine fisheries are highly diverse, differing in the security, durability and exclusivity of the harvesting privilege and the transferability of quota units. This diversity in the degree of harvest rights may influence the effectiveness of IQ fisheries to meet management objectives. We conduct...

The Lenfest Fishery Ecosystem Task Force, convened with support from the Lenfest Ocean Program, consists of 14 researchers pre-eminent in the sciences that support fisheries management. The purpose of the Task Force was to provide a blueprint for FEPs, with the goal of providing guidance to managers on implementing EBFM. The Task Force charge focus...