But when it comes to actually figuring out what makes a species or an entire ecosystem resilient 鈥� and how to promote that through restoration or management 鈥� there is a lack of consensus in the scientific community.

A by the 天美影视传媒 and NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center aims to provide clarity among scientists, resource managers and planners on what ecological resilience means and how it can be achieved. The study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first to examine the topic in the context of ecological restoration and identify ways that resilience can be measured and achieved at different scales.

“I was really interested in translating a broad concept like resilience into management or restoration actions,” said lead author , a fisheries biologist at Northwest Fisheries Science Center who completed the study as part of her graduate degree in marine and environmental affairs at the UW.

“I wanted to do something that addressed impacts of climate change and connected the science with management and restoration efforts.”

Timpane-Padgham scoured the scientific literature for all mentions of ecological resilience, then pared down the list of relevant articles to 170 examined for this study. She then identified in each paper the common attributes, or metrics, that contribute to resilience among species, populations or ecosystems. For example, genetic diversity and population density were commonly mentioned in the literature as attributes that help populations either recover from or resist disturbance.

Timpane-Padgham along with co-authors , professor and director of the UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, and , research biologist at Northwest Fisheries Science Center, grouped the various resilience attributes into five large categories, based on whether they affected individual plants or animals; whole populations; entire communities of plants and animals; ecosystems; or ecological processes. They then listed how many times each attribute was cited, which is one indicator of how well-suited a particular attribute is for measuring resilience.

“It’s a very nice way of organizing what was sort of a confused body of literature,” Beechie said. “It will at least allow people to get their heads around resilience and understand what it really is and what things you can actually measure.”

The researchers say this work could be useful for people who manage ecosystem restoration projects and want to improve the chances of success under climate change. They could pick from the ordered list of attributes that relate specifically to their project and begin incorporating tactics that promote resilience from the start.

“Specifying resilience attributes that are appropriate for the system and that can be measured repeatably will help move resilience from concept to practice,” Klinger said.

For example, with Puget Sound salmon recovery, managers are asking how climate change will alter various rivers’ temperatures, flow levels and nutrient content. Because salmon recovery includes individual species, entire populations and the surrounding ecosystem, many resilience attributes are being used to monitor the status of the fish and recovery of the river ecosystems that support them.

The can be downloaded and sorted by managers to find the most relevant measures for the type of restoration project they are tackling. It is increasingly common to account for climate change in project plans, the researchers said, but more foresight and planning at the start of a project is crucial.

“The threat of climate change and its impacts is a considerable issue that should be looked at from the beginning of a restoration project. It needs to be its own planning objective,” Timpane-Padgham said. “With this paper, I don’t want to have something that will be published and collect dust. It’s about providing something that will be useful for people.”

No external funding was used for this study.

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For more information, contact Timpane-Padgham at britta.timpane-padgham@noaa.gov or 206-861-1258.

In a published Dec. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from the 天美影视传媒 looked at the abstracts from more than 700 scientific papers about climate change to find out what makes a paper influential in its field. But instead of focusing on content, they looked at writing style, which is normally more the province of humanities professors rather than scientists.

Their idea was that papers written in a more narrative style 鈥� those that tell a story 鈥� might be more influential than those with a drier, more expository style. Psychology and literary theory have long held that if you want someone to remember something, you should communicate it in the form of a story. The UW researchers 鈥� led by , a recent graduate from the UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, and professors and 鈥� wondered whether this theory would hold up in the realm of peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Remarkably, it did. The most highly cited papers tended to include elements like sensory language, a greater degree of language indicating cause-and-effect and a direct appeal to the reader for a particular follow-up action.

“The results were especially surprising given that we often think of scientific influence as being driven by science itself, rather than the form in which it is presented,” Hillier said.

Perhaps even more surprising, the researchers noted, was the finding that the highest-rated journals tended to feature articles that had more narrative content.

“We don’t know if the really top journals pick the most readable articles, and that’s why those articles are more influential, or if the more narrative papers would be influential no matter what journal they are in,” Kelly said.

The researchers used a crowdsourcing website to evaluate the narrative content of the journal articles. Online contributors were asked a series of questions about each abstract to measure whether papers had a narrative style, including elements like language that appeals to one’s senses and emotions.

The researchers hope this work might lead to advances in scientific communication, improving the odds that science might lead the way to better decisions in the policy realm.

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For more information, contact Ryan Kelly at rpkelly@uw.edu or 206-616-0185.

The work by biodiversity researchers from the University of British Columbia, the 天美影视传媒 and colleagues in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and China, combines dozens of existing studies to paint a more nuanced picture of the impact of ocean acidification.

While most research in the field focuses on the impact of ocean acidification on individual species, the new work predicts how acidification will affect the living habitats such as corals, seagrasses and kelp forests that form the homes of other ocean species.

“Not too surprisingly, species diversity in calcium carbonate-based habitats like coral reefs and mussel beds were projected to decline with increased ocean acidification,” said lead author , a UBC zoologist and biodiversity researcher. Species that use calcium carbonate to build their shells and skeletons, like mussels and corals, are expected to be particularly vulnerable to acidification.

“The more complex responses are those of seagrass beds that are vital to many fisheries species. These showed the potential to increase the number of species they can support, but the real-world evidence so far shows that they’re not reaching this potential. This highlights a need to focus not only on individual species, but on how the supportive habitat that sets nature’s stage responds and interacts to climate change.”

The researchers combined data and observations from 10 field studies that measured the impact of underwater volcanic vents, which release carbon dioxide and mimic the conditions of future ocean acidification, on the density of habitat-forming species. They combined that data with 15 studies looking at how changes in habitat typically impact local species to make their predictions.

“This work demonstrates the value of international collaborations to address a problem that’s global in scope and crosses boundaries between distinct habitats and ecosystems,” said co-author , professor and director of the UW’s who also co-directs the . “We can begin to test predictions with data from different locations to better understand likely ecosystem responses to ocean acidification.”

The researchers focused their study on the impact of ocean acidification on coral reefs, mussel beds, kelp forests and seagrass meadows that form the homes of thousands of marine species. They used observations of altered habitats around the world to project how changes in these habitats brought on by ocean acidification will impact the number of species that each habitat can support.

The researchers were able to test their predictions against real-world data from two sites: a coral reef near Papua New Guinea and a group of seagrass beds in the Mediterranean. In the case of the coral reef, the diversity and complexity of marine life in the area decreased as acidification increased. Despite predictions that the seagrass beds would fare well under increased levels of carbon dioxide, no increases in biodiversity was observed.

Because there are so few test sites to use to directly test the model, the authors want to expand on the approach.

“We’ve known for a while that there will be big losers and some winners with climate change,” said UBC marine ecologist , senior author on the paper. “For example, in the Pacific Northwest, the number of medium to large-sized edible saltwater mussels is likely to decrease as the chemistry of our oceans changes, and this is bad news for the hundreds of species that use them for habitat.”

The study was funded by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Science Foundation and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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For more information, contact Klinger at tklinger@uw.edu or 206-685-2499.

This was adapted from a UBC .

Global carbon dioxide emissions are triggering troubling changes to ocean chemistry along the West Coast that require immediate, decisive actions to combat through a coordinated regional approach, a panel of scientific experts has unanimously concluded.

A failure to adequately respond to this fundamental change in seawater chemistry, known as ocean acidification, is anticipated to have devastating ecological consequences for the West Coast in the decades to come, the 20-member , which included scientists from the 天美影视传媒 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Seattle office, warned in a unveiled April 4.

鈥淭he findings of the West Coast OAH Science Panel build on those of the , extending those findings to the entire West Coast, and incorporating consideration of the growing stressor, hypoxia. The strength of the OAH Panel鈥檚 findings lies in the coordinated, regional approach to the problem and opportunities for mitigation and adaptation that are scaled to the West Coast,鈥� said , who participated in both panels and co-directs the . Klinger is also director and professor of the UW’s .

鈥淒ue to the combined impacts of ocean acidification and seasonal upwelling, the West Coast is exposed to unusually high volumes of seawater at elevated acidity levels,鈥� said Richard Feely of NOAA鈥檚 Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

Already, marine shelled organisms in Washington are having difficulty forming their protective outer shells, and the local shellfish industry is seeing high mortality rates in early life stages of some commercially important shellfish species when shell formation is critical.

鈥淭he acidity of West Coast waters is anticipated to continue to accelerate in lockstep with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions,鈥� Feely added.

The panel鈥檚 final report, titled 鈥�,鈥� summarizes the state of the science around the anticipated impacts of these multiple stressors on our marine resources. It outlines a series of potential management actions that the governments of Washington, Oregon, California and British Columbia can immediately begin implementing to offset and mitigate the economic and ecological impacts of ocean acidification.

The panel is urging ocean management and natural resource agencies to develop highly coordinated, comprehensive multiagency solutions, including:

• Reducing carbon emissions is critical to addressing the root cause
• Exploring approaches that involve the use of seagrass to remove carbon dioxide from seawater
• Supporting wholesale revisions to water-quality criteria that are used as benchmarks for improving water quality, as existing water-quality criteria were not written to protect marine organisms from the damaging effects of ocean acidification
• Identifying strategies for reducing the amounts of land-based pollution entering coastal waters, especially in bays, estuaries and sounds, as this pollution can exacerbate the intensity of acidification in some locations
• Enhancing a West Coast-wide monitoring network that provides information toward development of coastal ecosystem management plans
• Supporting approaches that enhance the adaptive capacity of marine organisms to cope with ocean acidification

The report emphasized that global carbon emissions are the dominant cause of ocean acidification and that the West Coast states should advance regional carbon management strategies. The panel deliberately focused its recommendations around actions West Coast ocean management and natural resource agencies can take in each jurisdiction to combat the challenge at the regional level.

For example, the (MRAC) 鈥� formed after the Blue Ribbon Panel on Ocean Acidification 鈥� is advancing the Blue Ribbon Panel鈥檚 ocean acidification strategies, helping Washington adapt and respond to ocean acidification. Its members plan to go to the state legislature in 2017 for more funding for research, monitoring, modeling and outreach.

The Washington Ocean Acidification Center is providing funds from the state legislature to shellfish growers to continue monitoring at five key sites in Puget Sound and Willapa Bay. The water-quality monitoring alerts growers to periods where conditions are not conducive for hatchery production so that they can maximize production and avoid losses due to ocean acidification.

The center is also partnering with NOAA Fisheries to perform experimental studies on Dungeness crab, and is collaborating with Washington Sea Grant to fund innovative, new experimental studies on the state’s salmon and sablefish.

鈥淭he Washington OA Center plays a role in coordinating science and monitoring, in collaboration with many partners, and then consistently communicating results to the MRAC, providing a critical link to policymakers and the legislature in Washington state. We find this structure to be an effective means of connecting science with policy and recommend that this type of coordination could be implemented along the West Coast,鈥� said , a UW oceanographer who co-directs the Washington Ocean Acidification Center and participated in both panels.

West Coast policymakers will use the panel鈥檚 recommendations to continue to advance management actions aimed at combating ocean acidification and hypoxia. This work will be coordinated through the Pacific Coast Collaborative, a coalition of the offices of the governors of Washington, Oregon, California, and the premier of British Columbia, which have been working together on ocean acidification since 2013.

The West Coast OAH Science Panel, which convened for a three-year period that ended in February, also has recommended the formation of a task force to continue to advance the scientific foundation for comprehensive, managerially relevant solutions to West Coast ocean acidification.

This was adapted from a release by the California Ocean Science Trust. .

Now, a panel of scientists from California, Oregon and Washington has examined the dual impacts of and low-oxygen conditions, or , on the physiology of fish and invertebrates. The , published in the January edition of the journal , takes an in-depth look at how the effects of these stressors can impact organisms such as shellfish and their larvae, as well as organisms that have received less attention so far, including commercially valuable fish and squid.

The results show that ocean acidification and hypoxia combine with other factors, such as rising ocean temperatures, to create serious challenges for marine life. These multiple-stressor effects will likely only increase as ocean conditions worldwide begin resembling those off the West Coast, which naturally expose marine life to stronger low-oxygen and acidification stressors than most other regions of the seas.

“Our research recognizes that these climate change stressors will co-occur, essentially piling on top of one another,” said co-author , professor and director of the 天美影视传媒’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs.

“We know that along the West Coast temperature and acidity are increasing, and at the same time, hypoxia is spreading. Many organisms will be challenged to tolerate these simultaneous stressors, even though they might be able to tolerate individual stressors when they occur on their own.”

Oceans around the world are increasing in acidity as they absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year. This changes the chemistry of the seawater and causes physiological stress to organisms, especially those with calcium carbonate shells or skeletons, such as oysters, mussels and corals.

Hypoxia, on the other hand, is a condition in which ocean waters have very low oxygen levels. At the extreme, hypoxia can result in “dead zones” where mass die-offs of fish and shellfish occur. The waters along the West Coast sometimes experience both ocean acidification and hypoxia simultaneously.

“Along this coast, we have relatively intensified conditions of ocean acidification compared with other places. And at the same time we have hypoxic events that can further stress marine organisms,” Klinger said. “Conditions observed along our coast now are forecast for the global ocean decades in the future. Along the West Coast, it’s as if the future is here now.”

Klinger is co-director of the based at the UW and served on the , which was convened two years ago to promote coast-wide collaboration and cooperation on science and policy related to these issues.

For this paper, the authors examined dozens of scientific publications that reported physiological responses among marine animals exposed to lower oxygen levels, elevated acidity and other stressors. The studies revealed how physiological changes in marine organisms can lead to changes in animal behavior, biogeography and ecosystem structure, all of which can contribute to broader-scale effects on the marine environment.

The tri-state panel has completed this phase of its work and will wrap things up in the coming months. Among the products already published or planned are a number of scientific publications 鈥� including this synthesis piece 鈥� as well as resources for policymakers and the general public describing ocean research priorities, monitoring needs and management strategies to sustain marine ecosystems in the face of ocean acidification and hypoxia.

The group’s other papers and findings related to ocean acidification and hypoxia will soon be available on its .

Co-authors of this paper include George Somero, Jody Beers and Steve Litvin at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station; Francis Chan of Oregon State University; and Tessa Hill of the University of California, Davis.

The research was funded by the California Ocean Protection Council, the California Ocean Science Trust, the Institute for Natural Resources at Oregon State University and the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Klinger at tklinger@uw.edu or 206-685-2499.

NSF grant number: OCE-1220338