4.7 Article

Climate change vulnerability assessment of the main marine commercial fish and invertebrates of Portugal

Journal

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -

Publisher

NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-82595-5

Keywords

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Funding

  1. FCT [UIDB/04326/2020]
  2. European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [678193]
  3. FCT/MCTES [UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020]
  4. Portuguese national funds from operational program MAR2020-FEAMP through project CLIMA-PESCA [MAR-01.03.02-FEAMP-0052]
  5. [n2/SAICT/2017-SAICT]
  6. [SAICT-45-2017-02]
  7. [ALG-01-0145-FEDER-028518]
  8. [PTDC/ASP-PES/28518/2017]
  9. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [PTDC/ASP-PES/28518/2017] Funding Source: FCT

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This study conducted an expert-based ecological vulnerability assessment on the main marine resources of Portugal in the context of climate change. It found that migratory and elasmobranch species had the highest vulnerabilities, while overall vulnerability scores were relatively low, possibly due to the high adaptive capacity of species from temperate ecosystems.
This is the first attempt to apply an expert-based ecological vulnerability assessment of the effects of climate change on the main marine resources of Portugal. The vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and expected directional effects of 74 species of fish and invertebrates of commercial interest is estimated based on criteria related to their life-history and level of conservation or exploitation. This analysis is performed separately for three regions of Portugal and two scenarios of climate change (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5). To do that, the fourth assessment report IPCC framework for vulnerability assessments was coupled to the outputs of a physical-biogeochemical model allowing to weight the exposure of the species by the expected variability of the environmental variables in the future. The highest vulnerabilities were found for some migratory and elasmobranch species, although overall vulnerability scores were low probably due to the high adaptive capacity of species from temperate ecosystems. Among regions, the highest average vulnerability was estimated for the species in the Central region while higher vulnerabilities were identified under climate change scenario RCP 8.5 in the three regions, due to higher expected climatic variability. This work establishes the basis for the assessment of the vulnerability of the human activities relying on marine resources in the context of climate change.

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