October 23, 2024 — In a massive research project spanning five years and stretching the length of the Northeast seaboard, a Wellesley College professor is examining how various fishing communities can change their fishing habits in order to adapt to climate change.
Rebecca Selden, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Wellesley, is creating a “spatial sea map” designed to illustrate the adaptive styles of 266 fishing communities stretching across the East Coast from North Carolina to Maine. Her research, conducted with colleagues from four other institutions, was published on October 15 in ICES Journal of Marine Science.
Selden’s project is one of the first to provide detailed, high-resolution information about how individual communities could change their fishing patterns in response to climate change. Such community-level information is critical to understand which communities might be most vulnerable or resilient to changes in the distribution of species that they fish.
Climate change is changing the seascape in many ways, Selden notes. The water is changing—becoming more acidified, for example. Species are relocating in order to adapt to changing water temperatures. And the ocean is being used in new and different ways—for ocean-based wind turbines, for example.
“These changes can challenge fishing communities that rely on marine resources,” Selden says. “Many communities have diversified what they catch, or where they fish, to cope with changes in where fish are found.”