With rapidly warming ocean regions comes changes in marine species distributions. Understanding and monitoring these changes is important for managing biosecurity threats as well as management of existing and changing living marine resources. Detecting range changes in the marine environment is difficult and expensive. For many species, assessment simply has not taken place. To combat this data gap and assist managers in directing limited research resources, Dr Lucy Robinson, research fellow at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) and colleagues suggest a new method – rapid screening assessment that uses a variety of sources.
Development of the method, which was recently published in Global Environmental Change , focused on waters off the east coast of Tasmania, and area where over the past 50 years warming has been nearly four times greater than the global average. Using field data from a number of sources, primarily from the citizen science program Redmap Australia, 47 species were assessed for range expansion. Categorising species based on confidence in their range expansion, 8 species – 6 fish species, a lobster and an octopus species - were categorised with a ‘‘high’’ confidence of potentially extending their ranges. These species, the researchers argue, are the ones that should be prioritised for impact assessment, with those falling in the “medium” and “low” confidence categories coming after.
The paper is behind a paywall, but if you have access (or want to buy a copy) you can find it here http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.12.003.