Malin L. Pinsky's research while affiliated with University of California, Santa Cruz and other places

Publications (162)

Article
Large‐scale shifts in marine species biogeography have been a notable impact of climate change. An effective explanation of what drives these species shifts, as well as accurate predictions of where they might move, is crucial to effectively managing these natural resources and conserving biodiversity. While temperature has been implicated as a maj...
Preprint
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Increasing the extent of protected areas (PA) through 30x30 and other area-based conservation initiatives can help to achieve global biodiversity conservation goals across all biodiversity levels. However, intraspecific genetic variation, the foundational level of biodiversity, is rarely explicitly considered in PA design or quality performance ass...
Preprint
Genetic diversity is a fundamental component of biodiversity. Examination of global patterns of genetic diversity can help highlight mechanisms underlying species diversity, though patterns may differ across the genome. Here, we compiled 6862 observations of genetic diversity from 492 species of marine fish, assessed their associations with macroec...
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Marine heatwaves have been linked to negative ecological effects in recent decades1,2. If marine heatwaves regularly induce community reorganization and biomass collapses in fishes, the consequences could be catastrophic for ecosystems, fisheries and human communities3,4. However, the extent to which marine heatwaves have negative impacts on fish b...
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Producers and users contributing to diverse scientific enterprises are often siloed. FISHGLOB is a sociotechnical infrastructure supporting collaboration and data sharing between experts in, and users of, fish bottom trawl surveys, a form of ocean monitoring.
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Coral reefs are both exceptionally biodiverse and threatened by climate change and other human activities. Here, we review population genomic processes in coral reef taxa and their importance for understanding responses to global change. Many taxa on coral reefs are characterized by weak genetic drift, extensive gene flow, and strong selection from...
Preprint
Genetic diversity is a fundamental component of biodiversity and the medium for speciation events. Examination of global patterns of genetic diversity can help highlight mechanisms underlying species diversity. Here, we compiled 6862 observations of genetic diversity from 492 species of marine fish globally, assessed their associations with macroec...
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Populations can adapt to novel selection pressures through dramatic frequency changes in a few genes of large effect or subtle shifts in many genes of small effect. The latter (polygenic adaptation) is expected to be the primary mode of evolution for many life-history traits but tends to be more difficult to detect than changes in genes of large ef...
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Aim Although species richness globally is likely to be declining, patterns in diversity at the regional scale depend on species gains within new habitats and species losses from previously inhabited areas. Our understanding of the processes associated with gains or losses remains poor, including whether these events exhibit immediate or delayed res...
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Recent research has revealed the diversity and biomass of life across ecosystems, but how that biomass is distributed across body sizes of all living things remains unclear. We compile the present-day global body size-biomass spectra for the terrestrial, marine, and subterranean realms. To achieve this compilation, we pair existing and updated biom...
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Traits underlie organismal responses to their environment and are essential to predict community responses to environmental conditions under global change. Species differ in life‐history traits, morphometrics, diet type, reproductive characteristics and habitat utilization. Trait associations are widely analysed using phylogenetic comparative metho...
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Understanding the evolutionary consequences of anthropogenic change is imperative for estimating long-term species resilience. While contemporary genomic data can provide us with important insights into recent demographic histories, investigating past change using present genomic data alone has limitations. In comparison, temporal genomics studies,...
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Scientific bottom-trawl surveys are ecological observation programs conducted along continental shelves and slopes of seas and oceans that sample marine communities associated with the seafloor. These surveys report taxa occurrence, abundance and/or weight in space and time, and contribute to fisheries management as well as population and biodivers...
Preprint
Understanding the evolutionary consequences of anthropogenic change is imperative for estimating long-term species resilience. While contemporary genomic data can provide us with important insights into recent demographic histories, investigating past change using present genomic data alone has limitations. In comparison, temporal genomics studies,...
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Global policy goals for halting biodiversity loss and climate change depend on each other to be successful. Marine biodiversity and climate change are intertwined through foodwebs that cycle and transport carbon and contribute to carbon sequestration. Yet, biodiversity conservation and fisheries management seldom explicitly include ocean carbon tra...
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Synopsis Understanding recent population trends is critical to quantifying species vulnerability and implementing effective management strategies. To evaluate the accuracy of genomic methods for quantifying recent declines (beginning <120 generations ago), we simulated genomic data using forward-time methods (SLiM) coupled with coalescent simulatio...
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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’.
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Abstract The demographic history of a population is important for conservation and evolution, but this history is unknown for many populations. Methods that use genomic data have been developed to infer demography, but they can be challenging to implement and interpret, particularly for large populations. Thus, understanding if and when genetic est...
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Obtaining dispersal estimates for a species is key to understanding local adaptation and population dynamics, and to implementing conservation actions. Genetic isolation‐by‐distance patterns can be used for estimating dispersal, and these patterns are especially useful for marine species in which few other methods are available. In this study, we g...
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As a consequence of anthropogenic climate change, marine species on continental shelves around the world are rapidly shifting deeper and poleward. However, whether these shifts deeper and poleward will allow species to access more, less, or equivalent amounts of continental shelf area and associated critical habitats remains unclear. By examining t...
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Society increasingly demands accurate predictions of complex ecosystem processes under novel conditions to address environmental challenges. However, obtaining the process‐level knowledge required to do so does not necessarily align with the burgeoning use in ecology of correlative model selection criteria, such as Akaike information criterion. The...
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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...
Article
A major challenge in modern biology is to understand extinction risk from climate change across all realms. Recent research has revealed that physiological tolerance, behavioral thermoregulation, and small elevation shifts are dominant coping strategies on land, whereas large-scale latitudinal shifts are more important in the ocean. Freshwater taxa...
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Model predicts a mass extinction event in the oceans if climate change is uncurbed
Article
Earlier maturation of Atlantic salmon is linked to indirect effects of fisheries on its prey
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Species ranges are shifting in response to climate change, but most predictions disregard food-web interactions and, in particular, if and how such interactions change through time. Predator-prey interactions could speed up species range shifts through enemy release or create lags through biotic resistance. Here, we developed a spatially explicit m...
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(read-only version: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/5KWZUPEPKC4RUVWP2YCS?target=10.1002/fsh.10695) The Ten Steps to Responsible Inland Fisheries are global recommendations to address the subordinate position of inland fisheries in sustainability dialogues. Regional and local perspectives are essential for implementing global initiativ...
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Given climate change threats to ecosystems, it is critical to understand the responses of species to warming. This is especially important in the case of apex predators since they exhibit relatively high extinction risk, and changes to their distribution could impact predator–prey interactions that can initiate trophic cascades. Here we used a comb...
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Marine mammals have been proposed as ecosystem sentinels due to their conspicuous nature, wide ranging distribution, and capacity to respond to changes in ecosystem structure and functioning. In southern European Atlantic waters, their response to climate variability has been little explored, partly because of the inherent difficulty of investigati...
Article
As climate change accelerates, species are shifting poleward and subtropical and tropical species are colonizing temperate environments. A popular approach for characterizing such responses is the community temperature index (CTI), which tracks the mean thermal affinity of a community. Studies in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems have...
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Emerging infectious diseases are significant threats to wildlife conservation, yet the impacts of pathogen exposure and infection can vary widely among host species. As such, conservation biologists and disease ecologists have increasingly aimed to understand species‐specific host susceptibility using molecular methods. In particular, comparative g...
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Explaining large-scale ordered patterns and their effects on ecosystem functioning is a fundamental and controversial challenge in ecology. Here, we coupled empirical and theoretical approaches to explore how competition and spatial heterogeneity govern the regularity of colony dispersion in fungus-farming termites. Individuals from different colon...
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As species respond to warming water temperatures, fishers dependent upon such species are being compelled to make choices concerning harvest strategies. Should they “follow fish” to new fishing grounds? Should they change their mix of target species? Should they relocate their operations to new ports? We examined how fishing communities in the Nort...
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Understanding how evolutionary forces interact to drive patterns of selection and distribute genetic variation across a species' range is of great interest in ecology and evolution, especially in an era of global change. While theory predicts how and when populations at range margins are likely to undergo local adaptation, empirical evidence testin...
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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...
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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...
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Significance Both theory and experiments suggest that fishing can drive the evolution of an earlier maturation age. However, determining whether changes in the wild are the result of fisheries-induced evolution has been difficult. Temporal, genome-wide datasets can directly reveal responses to selection. Here, we investigate the genomes of two wild...
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Determining metapopulation persistence requires understanding both demographic rates and patch connectivity. Persistence is well understood in theory but has proved challenging to test empirically for marine and other species with high connectivity that precludes classic colonisation–extinction dynamics. Here, we assessed persistence for a yellowta...
Article
Understanding the dynamics of species range edges in the modern era is key to addressing fundamental biogeographic questions about abiotic and biotic drivers of species distributions. Range edges are where colonization and extirpation processes unfold, and so these dynamics are also important to understand for effective natural resource management...
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Although different fisheries can be tightly linked to each other by human and ecosystem processes, they are often managed independently. Synchronous fluctuations among fish populations or fishery catches can destabilize ecosystems and economies, respectively, but the degree of synchrony around the world remains unclear. We analyzed 1092 marine fish...
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Understanding how community composition is reshaped by changing climate is important for interpreting and predicting patterns of community assembly through time or across space. Community composition often does not perfectly correspond to expectations from current environmental conditions, leading to community‐climate mismatches. Here, we combine d...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
Rapid evolution of advantageous traits following abrupt environmental change can help populations recover from demographic decline. However, for many introduced diseases affecting longer‐lived, slower reproducing hosts, mortality is likely to outpace the acquisition of adaptive de novo mutations. Adaptive alleles must therefore be selected from sta...
Article
Humans have a long history of extracting seemingly abundant resources from marine ecosystems. According to Ocean Recovery, fisheries can continue to provide sustainable nourishment and support global economies far into the future. The Hilborn duo take on the complexities of the past, present, and future of marine resource management from the perspe...
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Coral reefs are among the many communities believed to exhibit regime shifts between alternative stable states, single‐species dominance, and coexistence. Proposed drivers of regime shifts include changes in grazing, spatial clustering, and ocean temperature. Here, we distill the dynamic regimes of coral–macroalgal interaction into a three‐dimensio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent research has revealed the diversity and biomass of life on Earth, but how that biomass is distributed across body sizes remains unclear. We compile the present-day global body size-biomass spectra for the terrestrial, marine, and subterranean realms. To achieve this compilation, we pair biomass estimates with previously uncatalogued body siz...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent research provides an unprecedented account of the diversity and biomass of life, but the data also suggest unexplained patterns such as the co-dominance of very different life forms. We compile the planetary body size biomass spectrum across all taxa and investigate possible underlying forces. We find that small (10-14 g) and large (106 g) o...
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Marine biota are redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of...
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Societies increasingly use multisector ocean planning as a tool to mitigate conflicts over space in the sea, but such plans can be highly sensitive to species redistribution driven by climate change or other factors. A key uncertainty is whether planning ahead for future species redistributions imposes high opportunity costs and sharp trade-offs ag...
Article
Dispersal drives diverse processes from population persistence to community dynamics. However, the amount of temporal variation in dispersal and its consequences for metapopulation dynamics is largely unknown for organisms with environmentally driven dispersal (e.g., many marine larvae, arthropods and plant seeds). Here, we used genetic parentage a...
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Observational evidence shows marine species are shifting their geographic distribution in response to warming ocean temperatures. These shifts have implications for the US fisheries and seafood consumers. The analysis presented here employs a two-stage inverse demand model to estimate the consumer welfare impacts of projected increases or decreases...
Preprint
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A key problem in computational sustainability is to understand the distribution of species across landscapes over time. This question gives rise to challenging large-scale prediction problems since (i) hundreds of species have to be simultaneously modeled and (ii) the survey data are usually inflated with zeros due to the absence of species for a l...
Article
Full-text available
Marine biota are redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of...
Preprint
Dispersal drives diverse processes from population persistence to community dynamics. However, the amount of temporal variation in dispersal and its consequences for metapopulation dynamics is largely unknown for organisms with environmentally driven dispersal (e.g., many marine larvae, arthropods, and plant seeds). Here, we quantify variation in t...
Article
Projections of climate change impacts on living resources are being conducted frequently, and the goal is often to inform policy. Species projections will be more useful if uncertainty is effectively quantified. However, few studies have comprehensively characterized the projection uncertainty arising from greenhouse gas scenarios, Earth system mod...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A key problem in computational sustainability is to understand the distribution of species across landscapes over time. This question gives rise to challenging large-scale prediction problems since (i) hundreds of species have to be simultaneously modeled and (ii) the survey data are usually inflated with zeros due to the absence of species for a l...
Preprint
Full-text available
Marine biota is redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of d...
Article
Rapid climate changes are currently driving substantial reorganizations of marine ecosystems around the world. A key question is how these changes will alter the provision of ecosystem services from the ocean, particularly from fisheries. To answer this question, we need to understand not only the ecological dynamics of marine systems, but also hum...
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One of the aims of the United Nations (UN) negotiations on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is to develop a legal process for the establishment of area-based management tools, including marine protected areas, in ABNJ. Here we use a conservation planning algorithm to integrate...
Article
Dispersal sets the fundamental scales of ecological and evolutionary dynamics and has important implications for population persistence. Patterns of marine dispersal remain poorly understood, partly because dispersal may vary through time and often homogenizes allele frequencies. However, combining multiple types of natural tags can provide more pr...
Preprint
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Multiple attractors and alternative stable states are defining features of scientific theories in ecology and evolution, implying that abrupt regime shifts can occur and that outcomes can be hard to reverse. Here we describe a statistical inferential framework that uses independent, noisy observations with low temporal resolution to support or refu...
Article
Species around the world are shifting their ranges in response to climate change. To make robust predictions about climate‐related colonizations and extinctions, it is vital to understand the dynamics of range edges. This study is among the first to examine annual dynamics of cold and warm range edges, as most global change studies average observat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Coral reefs are among the many communities believed to exhibit regime shifts between alternative stable states, single-species dominance, and coexistence. Proposed drivers of regime shifts include changes in grazing, spatial clustering, and ocean temperature. Here we distill the dynamic regimes of coral-macroalgal interaction into a three-dimension...
Article
The geographic distributions of marine species are changing rapidly, with leading range edges following climate poleward, deeper, and in other directions and trailing range edges often contracting in similar directions. These shifts have their roots in fine-scale interactions between organisms and their environment—including mosaics and gradients o...
Article
Fishing communities are increasingly required to adapt to environmentally driven changes in the availability of fish stocks. Here, we examined trends in the distribution and biomass of five commercial target species (dover sole, thornyheads, sablefish, lingcod, and petrale sole) on the US west coast to determine how their availability to fishing po...
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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...
Article
The world is rapidly changing, and biotic resources and their users are adapting. Determining how ecological and economic interactions determine the outcomes of this adaptation is critical to understanding the future of natural resources. We model a two-species fisheries as a stylized system to investigate the adaptation strategies of a harvester f...
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Szuwalski argues that varying age structure can affect surplus production and that recruitment is a better metric of productivity. We explain how our null model controlled for age structure and other processes as explanations for the temperature-production relationship. Surplus production includes growth, recruitment, and other processes and provid...
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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...
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Climate change is expected to have a profound impact on the distribution, abundance and diversity of marine species globally1,2. These ecological impacts of climate change will affect human communities dependent on fisheries for livelihoods and well-being³. While methods for assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change are rapidly devel...
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Understanding which species and ecosystems will be most severely affected by warming as climate change advances is important for guiding conservation and management. Both marine and terrestrial fauna have been affected by warming1,2 but an explicit comparison of physiological sensitivity between the marine and terrestrial realms has been lacking. A...
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Accounting for a warming ocean Fisheries provide food and support livelihoods across the world. They are also under extreme pressure, with many stocks overfished and poorly managed. Climate change will add to the burden fish stocks bear, but such impacts remain largely unknown. Free et al. used temperature-specific models and hindcasting across fis...