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- One of the important things
to know about climate change
is that it's disproportionately affecting some systems
above others in the world.
And Alaska is one of the systems
that's being very heavily influenced.
For instance, we're learning that small amounts
of temperature change can have really big influences
on the ecosystem.
- It used to be we had six months of ice cover.
That is slowly disappearing.
In 2018, in the part of the Bering Sea we study,
there was virtually no ice.
That changes everything.
- NOAA Fisheries is managing the fisheries well in Alaska.
They're some of the best-managed fisheries
in the world.
What we're seeing though,
is that natural mortality is increasing.
And so that's in response to changes we're seeing
driven by climate change.
- The EcoFOCI program has been working
in Alaska's marine ecosystems for over 40 years now.
EcoFOCI is a joint program made up of biologists
and physical oceanographers.
We study ecosystem processes
in all of Alaska's large marine ecosystems,
trying to understand the effect of climate
on fisheries and ecosystems.
So historically, we were interested in studying fishing
because fishing had the most impact on fish survival.
But now what we're seeing is that these changes in climate
and changes in ocean properties
have the potential to have many, many greater impacts
on numbers of fish surviving than fishing ever could.
- The EcoFOCI program is providing us
with a holistic view of what's actually going on.
We're combining traditional fishery surveys
with oceanographic surveys
conducted multiple times per year,
and moorings that are deployed throughout the year
to collect continuous data.
- You've got two groups that are working together,
understanding the physical oceanography, currents,
temperature, salinity,
and another group trying to understand
the larger scale biological entities, fish,
and then everything in between.
So phytoplankton, zooplankton, and ultimately,
the goal here is to get a complete ecosystem's picture
from oceanography to the fish that comes to your table.
- So each year, fish will spawn,
and they release hundreds of thousands,
to millions to billions of eggs, depending on the species.
And of all of those eggs that are released,
a very small portion survives.
Somewhere on the order of 99.9% will perish.
So we are really looking in that 0.1% that survives
because we want to know what helps them survive,
and make it to adulthood.
One of the big climate questions that we're looking
at are some of these bottom-up pressures,
and this would include changes in timing of their food.
When is it available to those larvae
once they hatch from eggs?
If there's a mismatch in the timing
of when that food's available to those surviving larvae,
then fewer of them will survive.
And the consequence of that is less fish
that will grow to adulthood,
and then, be able to spawn, as well as support fisheries
in our area.
- And that affects the people that rely
on those fisheries' resources for food,
and also the communities that those fisheries support.
- The impacts of climate change are being felt
throughout Alaska, from Southeast to the Aleutian Islands,
and up into the Arctic.
The EcoFOCI program is expanding its coverage
to provide the data necessary to help fisheries respond
to changing conditions.
- So our longest time series for EcoFOCI
is in the Gulf of Alaska,
and that's a 40-plus year time series.
We have a time series in the Bering Sea
that's more on the order of 20 or so years, so two decades.
And then the Arctic is our newest time series,
but we're starting to get to that point
where we can see these patterns emerge
from the inter-annual variability, the noise.
And not all species are losers
in this context of climate change.
There will be shifts.
So, as some species see reductions,
others will increase in abundance.
And so what we do is we provide,
through these long-term time series,
information that NOAA Fisheries can translate
to these communities to help them be more flexible.
- It's really important to understand these climate impacts
on the Alaskan systems.
So the more data that we can provide
that are both real-time and predictive,
the better that we can help fishing families
and subsistence communities adapt.