Publication Abstract

Marine environment change over decades to millenia - an evaluation of 'proxy parameters' and their potential use in understanding the state of the marine ecosystem

Marine environment change over decades to millenia - an evaluation of 'proxy parameters' and their potential use in understanding the state of the marine ecosystem

P. Larcombe, S. Dye, B. Greenaway and E.R. Parker

Change is a fundamental part of all ecosystems. Marine ecosystems are driven by a series of factors which vary on timescales up to centuries and millennia, so that to understand the processes that make up an ecosystem, we need to understand the variation in those processes over a wide range of timescales.

For the UK marine environment, historical data are generally only available over the last few decades and rarely, over a century. New data generate important questions like ’Has this happened before?’ and, if so, ‘Can we infer what were the driving factors then?’ but these are difficult to answer and even more difficult to extrapolate to future scenarios.  The major climatic drivers of the marine ecosystems around the UK, such as those reflected in the NAOI (North Atlantic Oscillation Index), are variable on timescales of decades, so that to determine and understand the long-term record of change with sufficient confidence to distinguish any anthropogenic components will require time-series data of many decades and probably centuries. 

The UK Shelf Seas house dynamic ecosystems, whose natural resilience, boundaries and response to human pressures are not clear.  The process of choosing indicators of the status of the present marine environment and the confidence in the management actions they support could thus be greatly improved by considering the ability of indicators to be hindcast (i.e. taken back through time). This has implications for the scientific defensibility of ‘reference conditions’ and of the choice of marine ‘indicators’. The aim of this paper and the suggested use of proxy data is to:

• aid the transition from that of identifying an occurrence to that of assessing its significance and thus;
• help the design of appropriate management responses.

Reference:

P. Larcombe, S. Dye, B. Greenaway and E.R. Parker (Not yet published) Marine environment change over decades to millenia - an evaluation of 'proxy parameters' and their potentioal use in understanding the state of the marine ecosystem. ICES CM2006/P06

P. Larcombe*, S. Dye*, B. Greenaway and E.R. Parker*

ICES CM2006/P06