- Climate Impacts on Oceanic Top Predators

Rudy Kloser, CSIRO - CERF Surrogates program

The open oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet and contain more than 95% of the earth’s living space. Their deep water component is probably the largest and least-known major faunal group on earth despite its obvious importance to understand and manage at a global scale.

Our research (Figure below) is part of a major international effort to develop a global ocean Mid-trophic Automatic Acoustic Sampler (MAAS) as part of the CLimate Impacts on Oceanic TOp Predators (CLIOTOP) program. CLIOTOP is a ten year programme implemented under the international research programmes GLOBEC (2005 to 2009) and IMBER (2010 to 2014), two components of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. CLIOTOP focuses on oceanic top predators within their ecosystems and is based on a worldwide comparative approach among regions, oceans and species. It requires a substantive international collaborative effort to identify, characterise, monitor and model the key processes involved in the dynamics of oceanic pelagic ecosystems in the context of climate variability and intensive fishing of top predators. The goal is to develop a reliable predictive capacity combining observation and modelling for size-based single species and ecosystem dynamics at short, medium and long term scales. This will require observational platforms equipped with multi-frequency acoustics on a global scale and will be achieved through a combination of existing components and expertise – ARGOS buoys, vessels of opportunity, moorings, etc.

Full report and references Kloser_-_International_collaboration_-_mid-tropic_biodiversity.pdf