Description: Rapid anthropogenic climate change is a major threat to ocean biodiversity, increasing the challenge for marine conservation. Strategic conservation planning, and more recently marine spatial planning (MSP) are among the most promising management tools to operationalize and enforce marine conservation. As yet, climate change is seldom incorporated into these plans, potentially curtailing the effectiveness of designated conservation areas under novel environmental conditions. Reliable assessment of current and future climate change threats requires the ability to map climate-driven eco-evolutionary changes and the identification of vulnerable and resistant populations. Here we explore the heretofore largely unrecognized value of information gained from physiological, ecological and evolutionary studies to MSP under ongoing climate change. For example, we explore how climate threats do not necessarily follow latitudinal gradients, such that both risk hotspots and refugia occur in mosaic distributions along species ranges - patterns that may be undetectable without knowledge of biological vulnerabilities at regional and local scales. Because co-occurring species can exhibit markedly different vulnerabilities to the same environmental changes, making ecological predictions requires, when possible, measuring the fundamental niches of key species (e.g., with the use of thermotolerance experiments). Forecasting also requires development of tools to identify the likelihood of community-level thresholds or tipping points (e.g., with the use of near-real world mesocosms), and assessment of the potential of populations for adaptation (e.g., with common garden experiments). Such research will facilitate better predictive models for the fate of populations, species, ecosystems and their functions. Ultimately, unfolding the complexity of the processes underlying climate change impacts will facilitate quantifying and reducing uncertainty in spatial planning decision processes and will enable the development of practical tools to validate adaptive conservation strategies.

Description: Clonal behavior has been hypothesized to provide an escape from allometric metabolic scaling that limits the maximum mass achieved by a single individual. Here, we demonstrate the capacity of a wide-spread, non-native sea anemone to buffer its colony biomass accumulation rate across environments by modulating ramet body size through environmentally dependent growth, fission, and catabolism. In 2015, thermal reaction norms for growth and fission behavior were constructed using clonal lines of the sea anemone Diadumene lineata. In 2018, variation in growth patterns under a factorial cross of temperature level and oxygen availability was examined to test the hypothesis that individual ramet size is regulated by oxygen limitation in accordance with optimal size theory. Across a wide range of temperatures, colonies accumulated a similar amount of biomass despite a radical shift from unitary to clonal growth, supporting fission as a mechanism to buffer growth rates over a range of conditions. Individual body size appears to be regulated by the environment with increased temperature and reduced oxygen modifying fission and mass-specific growth patterns, leading to the production of smaller-bodied ramets in warm conditions. However, whether anemones in common garden conditions reduce individual body size through catabolism or fission depends on the region of origin and may relate to differences in seasonal temperature patterns among coastlines, which influence the energetic benefits of fission rate plasticity.

Description: There is growing evidence that climate change could affectmarine benthic systems. This review provides information of climate change-related impacts on the marine benthos in the North Atlantic. We cover a number of related research aspects, mainly in connection to two key issues. First, is the relationship between different physical aspects of climate change and the marine benthos. This section covers: (a) the responses to changes in seawater temperature (biogeographic shifts and phenology); (b) altered Hydrodynamics; (c) ocean acidification (OA); and (d) sea-level rise-coastal squeeze. The second major issue addressed is the possible integrated impact of climate change on the benthos. This work is based on relationships between proxies for climate variability, notably the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index, and the long-term marine benthos. The final section of our review provides a series of conclusions and future directions to support climate change research on marine benthic systems.