RESET · Resilience Estimation to SET management goals in marine ecosystems

Resilience Estimation to SET management goals in marine ecosystems

Maintaining resilient and healthy ecosystems and populations is fundamental in order to ensure critical services to humanity. However, it is still not clear how many impacts a system can absorb before changing to a completely new structure and configuration (i.e. undergoing a regime shift). Resilience is defined as the capability of a system to maintain the same structure and functions even if impacted by multiple pressures. Therefore, estimating resilience of natural system is crucial, in order to better understand whether they are closed to a regime shift and thus to ensure effective management. However, few methods exist to estimate resilience of natural systems from empirical data, which are still rather difficult to apply and interpret. This methodological limitation has hindered an uptake of the resilience concept into management and policy frameworks. However, considering that under climate change regime shifts are predicted to increase, it would be crucial to include resilience estimation into management practices in order to sustainably manage our ecosystems in the future. In this context, RESET aims at establishing a novel framework to estimate resilience of natural systems from empirical data (i.e. using statistical modelling). The project uses as case study the Northern Adriatic Sea, which is a system highly impacted by multiple anthropogenic pressures, such as fishing, climate change and eutrophication. Different types of data are available for this system, which is crucial in order to perform RESET. Regime shifts have been previously documented in the Northern Adriatic Sea at the plankton community level, but they were never previously recorded in the fish community or at an ecosystem level. Therefore, the first objective of RESET is to analyse how the community of the Northern Adriatic Sea (i.e. fish, crustaceans and mollusks) changed over time and whether regime shifts have occurred in the past. Based on this knowledge RESET aims at understanding the present resilience of the Northern Adriatic Sea in order to better project how it might react to future global changes. To achieve this, the framework to estimate resilience was firstly developed and validated. Understanding whether natural systems underwent regime shifts and whether they are closed to a new timing point (i.e. estimating their resilience) is fundamental in order to manage them and ensure a sustainable exploitation. The second objective of the RESET is mainly linked with alternative methods to detect and anticipate regime shifts. Indeed, statistical methods often fail to successfully estimate the resilience of complex systems. Moreover these methods require a high simplification of the reality, which could mask potential important changes. Therefore, the second objective of RESET aims at understanding whether Local Ecological Knowledge could be useful to detect and anticipate tipping points. In particular, Fishers Ecological Knowledge was explored. Fishers experience the sea everyday and experience how it changes and how it is impacted. University of Padova has a strong collaboration with fishers at Chioggia harbour (biggest fishing harbour in Italy) and thus, in order to understand if fisher were able to detect and anticipate regime shifts, interviews were performed. The last objective of RESET aims at understanding how to incorporate resilience into policy measures. This is crucial, since regime shifts are predicted to increase with climate change. At present, management measures do not operationally include resilience or regime shifts and therefore a paradigm shift should be favoured in order to focus more on this theme. The application and integration of multiple methods in order to improve the confidence level that these dynamics will occur is crucial to favour the inclusion of resilience into management. By achieving these three objectives, RESET will surpass the state of the art of regime shifts and resilience in marine systems. First of all, it will develop a novel framework to measure resilience in complex systems from empirical data. While such frameworks exist, the new method will be easier to apply and interpret and will be based on the impact of interactive pressures on natural system, an important step to better understand the impact of global changes. Apart from this, RESET will investigate for the first time the presence of regime shifts in the Northern Adriatic Sea community, employing cutting edge methodologies. Another advancement in the field will be understanding the potential usefulness of Local Ecological Knowledge to anticipate regime shifts. This has never been tested before and is crucial to increase the methodologies and the data available to project regime shifts. Finally, understanding how to operationally include resilience into management is a step towards a future inclusion of this concept into policy frameworks. The impact of RESET will be therefore very high, but not limited, to ecological science, mainly marine but also terrestrial ecology. Regime shifts can occur in very diverse field such as economy, medicine (e.g. cell differentiation and tumour development), epidemiology, behavioural science etc. Therefore, the framework developed by RESET to model resilience and regime shifts will be useful and could have an impact outside the ecological field. Economic and societal impact could also results from RESET. Indeed, the inclusion of resilience into management could help to better and sustainably manage our resources in the face of global changes and could therefore lead to economic and societal benefits.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз