December 17, 2014 — This data is a valuable tool for the fishermen, fishery managers and scientists who are grappling with the challenge of adapting fishing regulations to a changing climate.
Ever wonder why black sea bass quotas are so low, yet fishermen catch so many? Or why it’s easy for Rhode Island to overfish summer flounder quotas? Why cod have moved offshore or why cobia is now being caught in our waters more than ever before?
They all have to do with our oceans warming, which has caused fish populations to move north or into deeper, cooler water.
Now, you can track 80 Northeast native species (650 in total) on a new Rutgers University website called OceanAdapt.
How warm is the water? URI studies confirm that Narragansett Bay has warmed 2 to 2.5 degrees, depending on time of year, over the past 45 years.
Jonathan Hare, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Narragansett Laboratory, and Malin Pinsky, of Rutgers’ Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, have developed OceanAdapt as a collaboration between the Pinsky Lab at Rutgers and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The website provides information about the impacts of changing climate and other factors on the distribution of marine life. It hosts an annually updated database of fisheries surveys and provides tools for exploring changes in marine fish distribution.
Read the fulll story from the Providence Journal