Predicting Pacific cod spawning habitat in a changing climate

Abstract

Warming temperatures elicit shifts in habitat use and geographic distributions of fishes, with uneven effects across life stages. Spawners and embryos are particularly sensitive to environmental conditions, with direct impacts of temperature on spawning habitat, as well as indirect connections between their population dynamics and fisheries effort, productivity, and management. Here, we ask how changing environmental conditions and thermal sensitivities of developing embryos confer spatiotemporal variability of thermally-suitable spawning habitat for Pacific cod in the eastern Bering Sea. Specifically, we use bottom temperature values from regionally downscaled global climate models coupled with an experimentally-derived relationship between hatch success and temperature to predict how the extent, mean latitude, and consistency of suitable spawning habitat has changed in the past and may change into the future. We then validate our predictions of suitable spawning habitat with distributions of adults and larvae and examine whether thermal habitat availability relates to recruitment success into the adult cod into the population. We find that the extent and mean latitude of suitable spawning habitat increase over time, particularly if no climate change mitigation occurs in the future. Hotspots of suitable spawning habitat are consistent across shorter time periods but do shift across the Bering Sea shelf by the end of the century. Finally, we find no correlation between the availability of suitable spawning habitat and annual estimates of recruitment. Collectively, our results suggest that as temperatures warm, the availability of suitable spawning habitat will increase and expand spatially and, thus, is not likely to limit recruitment. This work highlights the importance of coupling experimental data with climate models to identify the complex and mechanistic dynamics among temperature, life histories, and ecology, and offers a pathway for examining life stage-specific changes in habitat use and distribution with continued climate change.