William Cheung

University of British Columbia - Vancouver | UBC · Institute for the oceans and Fisheries

Harmful fisheries subsidies contribute to overfishing leading to environmental and societal impacts1. If only fisheries within the subsidising nations’ jurisdiction were affected, then unilateral actions might be sufficient to help safeguard our ocean and the people reliant upon it. However, just as fish move between jurisdictions2, so too do the s...

Background Animal movement data are regularly used to infer foraging behaviour and relationships to environmental characteristics, often to help identify critical habitat. To characterize foraging, movement models make a set of assumptions rooted in theory, for example, time spent foraging in an area increases with higher prey density. Methods We...

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich¹, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats², and contribute to the health³, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities...

Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

Ocean temperature and dissolved oxygen shape marine habitats in interplay with species’ physiological characteristics. Therefore, the observed and projected warming and deoxygenation in the 21st century of the world’s oceans may strongly affect species’ habitats. Here, we implement an extended version of the Aerobic Growth Index (AGI), which quanti...

The ocean has recently taken centre stage in the global geopolitical landscape. Despite rising challenges to the effectiveness of multilateralism, attention to ocean issues appears as an opportunity to co-create pathways to ocean sustainability at multiple levels. The ocean science community, however, is not sufficiently well organised to advance t...

Understanding mechanisms that promote social-ecological resilience can inform future adaptation strategies. Among seafood dependent communities, these can be illuminated by assessing change among fisheries portfolios. Here, in collaboration with a Coast Salish Nation in British Columbia, Canada, we used expert Indigenous knowledge and network analy...

Conservation approaches to social-ecological systems have largely been informed by a framing of preserving nature for its instrumental societal benefits, often ignoring the complex relationship of humans and nature and how climate change might impact these. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) was developed by the Task Force on scenarios and models o...

Vulnerability of marine species to climate change (including ocean acidification, deoxygenation, and associated changes in food supply) depends on species’ ecological and biological characteristics. Most existing assessments focus on coastal species but systematic analysis of climate vulnerability for the deep sea is lacking. Here, we combine a fuz...

Rebuilding overexploited marine populations is an important step to achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14-Life Below Water. Mitigating major human pressures is required to achieve rebuilding goals. Climate change is one such key pressure, impacting fish and invertebrate populations by changing their biomass and biogeography. H...

Global obligations to achieve sustainable oceans by 2030 require countries to commit to solutions that balance ocean use and protection. To do so necessitates baseline understanding of the ocean’s contribution to socio-economic well-being, which we do by measuring the economic activity of ocean-related sectors. Economic assessments tend to be data...

Warming increases the metabolic rates of fishes and drives their oxygen demands above environmental oxygen supply, leading to declines in fish growth and smaller population sizes. Given the wide variability in species' sensitivity to changing temperature and oxygen levels, warming and oxygen limitation may be altering the composition of fish commun...

Fishery resources are threatened by environmental changes and anthropogenic pressures, particularly in coastal ecosystems. It is crucial to understand the changes of fish communities and their responses to environmental changes and human disturbances to formulate rational fisheries and ecosystem-based management. The Pearl River Estuary (PRE) is a...

High levels of methylmercury (MeHg) have been reported in Arctic marine biota, posing health risks to wildlife and human beings. Although MeHg concentrations of some Arctic species have been monitored for decades, the key environmental and ecological factors driving temporal trends of MeHg are largely unclear. We develop an ecosystem-based MeHg bio...

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can often be produced in ways that are more environme...

Arctic ecosystems are at risk to climate impacts, challenging existing conservation measures such as protected areas. This study aims to describe the ecological dynamics of the Canadian Beaufort Sea Shelf (BSS) ecosystem and the Tarium Niryutait Marine Protected Area (TNMPA) under historical changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice extent. Us...

Transformative governance is key to addressing the global environmental crisis. We explore how transformative governance of complex biodiversity–climate–society interactions can be achieved, drawing on the first joint report between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and E...

Among ectotherms, rare species are expected to have a narrower thermal niche breadth and reduced acclimation capacity and thus be more vulnerable to global warming than their common relatives. To assess these hypotheses, we experimentally quantified the thermal sensitivity of seven common, uncommon, and rare species of temperate marine annelids of...

Climate change is altering the distribution and composition of marine fish populations globally, which presents substantial risks to the social and economic well-being of humanity. While deriving long-term climatic baselines is an essential step for detecting and attributing the magnitude of climate change and its impacts, these baselines tend to b...

The organisms that inhabit Oxygen Minimum Zones (OMZ) have specialized adaptations that allow them to survive within a very narrow range of environmental conditions. Consequently, even small environmental perturbations can result in local species distribution shifts that alter ecosystem trophodynamics. Here, we examined the effect of changing sea w...

Climate change is causing shifts in biogeography of marine species, towards higher latitude, deeper waters, or following local temperature gradients. Such species distribution changes are affecting global fisheries through increasing the dominance of warmer-water preferred species as ocean temperature increases. Previous modeling analyses projected...

Climate change can affect fish individuals or schools, and consequently the fisheries. Studying future changes of fish distribution and abundance helps the scientific management of fisheries. The dynamic bioclimate envelope model (DBEM) was used to identify the “environmental preference profiles” of the studied species based on outputs from three E...

Climate change is shifting the distribution of shared fish stocks between neighboring countries' Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the high seas. The timescale of these transboundary shifts determines how climate change will affect international fisheries governance. Here, we explore this timescale by coupling a large ensemble simulation of an Ea...

The contributions of species to ecosystem functions or services depend not only on their presence but also on their local abundance. Progress in predictive spatial modelling has largely focused on species occurrence rather than abundance. As such, limited guidance exists on the most reliable methods to explain and predict spatial variation in abund...

The sustainability of global seafood supply to meet increasing demand is facing several challenges, including increasing consumption levels due to a growing human population, fisheries resources over-exploitation and climate change. Whilst growth in seafood production from capture fisheries is limited, global mariculture production is expanding. Ho...

Ocean acidification (OA) affects marine organisms through various physiological and biological processes, yet our understanding of how these translate to large-scale population effects remains limited. Here, we integrated laboratory-based experimental results on the life history and physiological responses to OA of the American lobster, Homarus ame...

Arctic sea ice loss has direct consequences for predators. Climate-driven distribution shifts of native and invasive prey species may exacerbate these consequences. We assessed potential changes by modelling the prey base of a widely distributed Arctic predator (ringed seal; Pusa hispida) in a sentinel area for change (Hudson Bay) under high- and l...

As part of the ongoing Oceans Asia project, commissioned by ADM Capital Foundation in 2014, this report follows the 2015 report Boom or Bust: The Future of Fish in the South China Sea. Research scientists from the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries modelled the trajectories of East and South China Sea fisheries...

Projections of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems have revealed long-term declines in global marine animal biomass and unevenly distributed impacts on fisheries. Here we apply an enhanced suite of global marine ecosystem models from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (Fish-MIP), forced by new-generation Earth...

Globally, wild decapod crustacean fisheries are growing faster than fisheries of any other major group, yet little attention has been given to the benefits, costs, and risks of this shift. We examined more than 60 years of global fisheries landings data to evaluate the socioeconomic and ecological implications of the compositional change in global...

Ocean net primary production (NPP) results from CO2 fixation by marine phytoplankton, catalysing the transfer of organic matter and energy to marine ecosystems, supporting most marine food webs, and fisheries production as well as stimulating ocean carbon sequestration. Thus, alterations to ocean NPP in response to climate change, as quantified by...

Feedbacks are an essential feature of resilient socio-economic systems, yet the feedbacks between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing are not fully accounted for in global policy efforts that consider future scenarios for human activities and their consequences for nature. Failure to integrate feedbacks in our knowledge frameworks...

Extreme temperature events have occurred in all ocean basins in the past two decades with detrimental impacts on marine biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services. However, global impacts of temperature extremes on fish stocks, fisheries, and dependent people have not been quantified. Using an integrated climate-biodiversity-fisheries-economic...

A first mass balance food web model was developed to parameterize and characterize the structure and functioning of the upwelling ecosystem in the Southern Taiwan Strait (STWS). The model representing the ecosystem state and trophic flows in 2001 includes 50 functional groups from primary producers to marine mammal and 6 fishing fleets. The basic o...

Harmful fisheries subsidies contribute to overfishing leading to environmental and societal impacts1. If only fisheries within the subsidising nations’ jurisdiction were affected, then unilateral actions might be sufficient to help safeguard our ocean and the people reliant upon it. However, just as fish move between jurisdictions2, so too do the s...

Fisheries resources in Hong Kong have been overexploited since the 1970s due to intensive bottom trawling and other fishing activities that have depleted stocks and destroyed marine habitat. To rehabilitate depleted fisheries resources, a permanent ban on trawling in Hong Kong territorial waters came into force on December 31, 2012. In order to det...

Coral reefs worldwide are facing impacts from climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution. The cumulative effect of these impacts on global capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services is un- known. Here, we evaluate global changes in extent of coral reef habitat, coral reef fishery catches and effort, Indigenous consum...

Aquatic foods from marine and freshwater systems are critical to the nutrition, health, livelihoods, economies and cultures of billions of people worldwide, but climate-related hazards may compromise their ability to provide these benefits. Here, we estimate national-level aquatic food system climate risk using an integrative food systems approach...

Climate change is shifting the distribution of shared fish stocks between neighboring countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) and the high seas. The timescale of these transboundary shifts determines how climate change will affect international fisheries governance. Coupling a large ensemble simulation of an Earth system model to a species distri...

Crustaceans were among the most valuable fishery resources in Hong Kong. However, the unrestricted and intensive use of different fishing gears, especially bottom trawling, has led to the depletion of commercially important crustaceans in Hong Kong since the 1980s. This study investigated whether commercial crustaceans recovered after the implement...

Climate change is warming the ocean and impacting lower trophic level (LTL) organisms. Marine ecosystem models can provide estimates of how these changes will propagate to larger animals and impact societal services such as fisheries, but at present these estimates vary widely. A better understanding of what drives this inter-model variation will i...

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, Nature as Culture. In this paper, we describe how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support policy....

Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is causing global ocean changes and drives changes in organism physiology, life-history traits, and population dynamics of natural marine resources. However, our knowledge of the mechanisms and consequences of ocean acidification (OA) – in combination with other climatic drivers (i.e., warming, deoxygenat...

Fish are rich in bioavailable micronutrients, such as zinc and iron, deficiencies of which are a global food security concern.¹,² Global marine fisheries yields are threatened by climate change and overfishing,³,⁴ yet understanding of how these stressors affect the nutrients available from fisheries is lacking.⁵,⁶ Here, using global assessments of...

There are many sources of uncertainty in scenarios and models of socio-ecological systems, and understanding these uncertainties is critical in supporting informed decision-making about the management of natural resources. Here, we review uncertainty across the steps needed to create socio-ecological scenarios, from narrative storylines to the repr...

The contributions of species to ecosystem functions or services depend not only on their presence in a given community, but also on their local abundance. Progress in predictive spatial modelling has largely focused on species occurrence, rather than abundance. As such, limited guidance exists on the most reliable methods to explain and predict spa...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03496-1.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are key to averting continued loss of species and ecosystem services in our oceans, but concerns around economic trade-offs hamper progress. Here we provide optimized planning scenarios for global MPA networks that secure species habitat while minimizing impacts on fisheries revenues. We found that MPA coverage require...

The ocean contains unique biodiversity, provides valuable food resources and is a major sink for anthropogenic carbon. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an effective tool for restoring ocean biodiversity and ecosystem services1,2, but at present only 2.7% of the ocean is highly protected³. This low level of ocean protection is due largely to confli...

Marine fisheries in African waters contribute substantially to food security and local economies in African coastal nations. Recently, there are growing concerns about the sustainability of living marine resources in these countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs) due to increased risks from climate change, pollution and potential over‐exploitatio...

Ocean warming and deoxygenation are affecting the physiological performance of marine species by increasing their oxygen demand while reducing oxygen supply. Impacts on organisms (e.g., growth and reproduction) can eventually affect entire populations, altering macroecological dynamics and shifting species’ distribution ranges. To quantify the effe...

Effective fisheries management is necessary for the long-term sustainability of fisheries and the economic benefits that they provide, but focusing only on ecological sustainability risks disregarding ultimate goals related to well-being that must be achieved through broader social policy. An analysis of global landings data shows that average fish...

The future of the global ocean economy is currently envisioned as advancing towards a ‘blue economy’—socially equitable, environmentally sustainable and economically viable ocean industries. However, tensions exist within sustainable development approaches, arising from differing perspectives framed around natural capital or social equity. Here we...

Climate change impacts on marine life in the world ocean are expected to accelerate over the 21st century, affecting the structure and functioning of food webs. We analyzed a key aspect of this issue, focusing on the impact of changes in biomass flow within marine food webs and the resulting effects on ecosystem biomass and production. We used a mo...