Investigating the potential impacts of ocean warming on the Norwegian and Barents Seas ecosystem using a time-dynamic food-web model

Life history genomic regions explain differences in Atlantic salmon marine diet specialization

“…On the other hand, the relatively small number of diet species in our dataset, all of which were fishes, and the small proportion of undigested material provided us with a robust quantification of the diet and a powerful statistical framework with ecologically relevant response variables. Finally, the three most common prey species in our dataset (e.g., herring, capelin and sand eel) are from similar trophic levels independent of size or ontogeny (Dommasnes et al., Bentley et al 2017). Therefore, alternative approaches such as stable isotope analysis, which is sensitive to diet variation only across trophic levels, would have been unable to tease the observed variation apart, suggesting that stomach content analysis is a more robust approach when diet composition is variable only within similar trophic levels.…”

“…Individuals exhibit differences in prey preference and prey acquisition efficiency, which, if heritable, may be a target of selection and ultimately promote ecological specialization (Fox and Morrow 1981, Smith and Skulason 1996, Devictor et al 2010, Elmer et al 2010, Machovsky-Capuska et al 2016, Sexton et al 2017). Large-scale disturbances in community structure, e.g., as a result of climate change (Sydeman et al 2015) alter food web structures and the composition of available resources (Daufresne et al 2009, Pershing et al 2015, Bentley et al 2017), forcing species to rapidly adapt to new diet landscapes. Therefore, understanding the underlying mechanisms shaping food acquisition strategies is fundamental to evolutionary biology and vital for predicting species survival in a changing world.…”

Unbounded boundaries and shifting baselines: Estuaries and coastal seas in a rapidly changing world

“…Studies that investigate the impact/s of individual pressures on ecosystem structure and functioning provide key pieces of information for understanding a larger puzzle.However, it is the cumulative, synergistic and antagonistic effects of multiple pressures (e.g. over-exploitation, habitat loss and climate change effects) that have been shown to be most significant in the loss, depletion and turnover of species in estuaries and coastal seas (Lotze et al, 2006, Scavia et al, 2002, Burney and Flannery, 2005, Peer and Miller, 2014, Bentley et al, 2017. The environmental complexity of estuarine and coastal systems and the intricacy of underlying drivers means that the effects of multiple pressures (on a series of ecosystem components and levels of biological organisation; Parmesan et al, 2013) must be understood in order to assess the overall impacts of global change.…”

“…Humans have altered and manipulated estuarine and coastal systems for thousands of years (Weckström et al, 2017, Canuel et al, 2017, Long et al, 1998, Taffs et al, 2008 making it difficult to isolate anthropogenic from environmental influences and identify reference (or 'baseline') conditions for contemporary and future modelling studies (Lotze et al, 2006, Bentley et al, 2017. Studies that apply a long-term perspective are key here, as they can indicate trajectories of change both before and during human occupation that more traditional contemporary studies cannot (e.g.…”

“…This is valuable in determining the degree of anthropogenic influence in estuarine and coastal areas (i.e. fluctuation from this baseline), understanding natural variability of the system and for contextualising present-day trends and ecosystem functioning in the longer-term, all of which are essential for successful coastal management and restoration (Bennion and Battarbee, 2007, Santschi et al, 2001, Bentley et al, 2017. In this SI, a number of authors applied palaeoecological or historical approaches to evaluate human imprint and gain a pre-industrial perspective on estuarine status.…”