Tracing climate Impacts

Precarious livelihoods

My thinking about seabirds and wild salmon under climate change has been shaped quite a lot by social anthropology—in particular The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing and Reclaiming the Discarded by Kathleen Millar. This 2025 SMMR webinar (video on youtube; slides as PDF) explains some of my current thinking about … Read more

“to see sandeel the way kittiwakes do”

Kittiwakes and many other UK seabirds have declined rapidly over several decades, alongside declines in the energy available in the ocean food chain that supports them. Agnes Olin’s PhD project (2018-2020) focused on sandeels as a link in this chain, looking upward to their spatial association with trends in kittiwake numbers, and downward to changes … Read more

Future oceanography of Puget Sound: a first look

Climate change pushes on coastal and estuarine regions by a lot of pathways simultaneously, and it is surprisingly hard to untangle and prioritise these. As just one example from the US Pacific Northwest: should we expect future water temperatures to go up or down? Up makes sense, because of atmospheric warming. Down also makes sense, … Read more

Coltrane (Copepod Life-history Traits and Adaptation to Novel Environments)

The Coltrane (Copepod Life history Traits and Adaptation to New Environments) model is a mathematical framework for layering multiple levels of mesozooplankton biology on top of oceanographic models. It resolves 1) individual life history (strategy traits controlling growth, development, and size, diagnosed from a broad review of lab studies); 2) population dynamics (the time-dependent energy … Read more

The Bering Sea in spring, 1971-2050

The Eastern Bering Sea hosts extremely rich pelagic and benthic fisheries, and also experiences strong interannual variation in both fisheries recruitment and the underlying physics and plankton biology. This paper…

FISH 330: Climate Impacts on Marine Ecosystems (2013)

Course announcement: This course links the physics of climate to marine ecosystem processes, exploring both observed climate impacts from the past and projected impacts of human-caused climate change in the future. Case studies include a spectrum of organisms from plankton to whales, in polar, sub-arctic, temperate, tropical, and upwelling ecosystems. We will also discuss the … Read more