Towards a Process Based Understanding of Climate Change Consequences on Ecosystems

Ocean variability has long been known to show strong decadal and multi-decadal variability that significantly affects the weather and climate of the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as the Arctic Ocean. Past observations of ecosystem responses to climate variability can provide an overall understanding of how future climate change will impact marine resources. Here, we consider how four large marine ecosystems (LMEs), the southeast Bering Sea, the Northeast US Shelf, the Norwegian Sea, and the Barents Sea differ in their response to climate change and how the local processes play important roles in shaping the interactions between physics and biology. Particularly, we focus on how these selected ecosystems have historically responded to climate variability and discuss some of the implications future climate change may have on these systems. We also analyze how the physical properties of each of these ecosystems are expected to change in the future and discuss possible consequences for the marine ecology such as primary production, functional diversity, and ecosystem composition.  Finally, we discuss key areas of future research including how to use a mechanistic framework to more quantitatively assess how key ecosystem processes will be impacted by climate change.