Edited by William W.L. Cheung, Vicky W.Y. Lam, and Daniel Pauly.

DIRECTOR'S FOREWORD

This report is the first publication of the Sea Around Us Project focusing on global warming and its effects on marine fisheries. It is therefore a report on methodology: we had to first develop methodological approaches before results could be presented.

The first contribution in this report describes a new approach and software for simulating the widely documented poleward movement of marine fishes and invertebrates in response to warming oceans. The software for simulating these movements implements a model, largely driven by the temperature changes predicted for the next decades by coupled atmosphere-ocean models, which considers a moderately large number of processes (reproduction, survival, migration, etc.) and features of the organisms in question (affinities to certain habitats, depth ranges, etc.). However, the model was designed such that it would be straightforward to parameterize, at least for 1,500+ species and higher taxa used by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to reports on global marine fisheries statistics, and for all of which the Sea Around Us Project has basic information, including detailed distribution range maps.

Thus, the first paper in this report will serve as starting point for several planned articles on global warming effects on marine communities and fisheries, with the model at its core being gradually modified and improved as applications are completed.

The second and third contributions in this report deal with the distribution range maps of marine taxa used by the model in the first. Thus, they propose a number of simple adjustments which help take seasonality and other modifying factors into account, both when generating present distribution range maps, and when shifting them poleward using the model mentioned above.

The projections that we hope to generate, using these data and models, will obviously not be the last word on the poleward migration of marine fishes and invertebrates. However, because they cover a set of globally important species, they will enable the Sea Around Us Project to contribute in a major way to debates on the possible impacts of global warming on marine fisheries and biodiversity, a key environmental issue for the next decades.

Daniel Pauly
Director, Fisheries Centre

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