Morning plenary sessions to provide overarching keynote presentations and to introduce topics for the concurrent sessions to be convened on the same day.

Plenary Speakers

Management of marine fisheries is always difficult due to the large number of factors, actors, and uncertainties involved. Dealing with highly migratory and transboundary resources inhabiting transitional areas is even more complex because one has to (1) consider a wider range of environmental and ecological factors and diverse ecosystems often used by populations for different processes during the life stages (reproduction, nursing, feeding), (2) deal with very large geographical distributions and their changes at different time scales, and (3) understand that more than one political, legal and technical framework may be involved in the stocks assessment, exploitation and management. This session welcomes contributions dealing with theoretical and practical examples of assessment, management, stocks identification, and other management tools (i.e., market incentives) of marine transitional areas and their fish resources. Case studies on successful implementation of solutions to deal with the complexities of highly migratory resources are particularly encouraged.

Understanding of marine physical and ecological processes has progressed considerably in recent decades with development of advanced observational instruments, analysis techniques and coupled bio-physical numerical models. Nevertheless, observing and modeling transition zones remains a challenge due to the multi-scale variability and complex trophic interactions associated with these regions. The strong gradient of physical properties gives rise to fine-scale disturbances, which impacts biological production in multiple trophic levels and are not necessarily resolved in observations or models. In this session, we invite presentations that explore physical, chemical and biological processes in the Pacific transitional areas through advanced techniques of observation, modeling, rearing and laboratory analyses.

Transitional areas between coastal shelf and offshore regions produce strong physical, chemical, and biological gradients influencing a wide variety of processes including biogeochemical cycling, phytoplankton size and production, plankton and fish community structure, and biodiversity. These transitional areas are characterized by variable mesoscale currents, fronts, rings, filaments and eddies that impact nutrient fluxes, acidification, deoxygenation and plankton transport. A better understanding of the processes controlling the exchange is necessary in order to predict responses to climate change. In this session, we welcome presentations on observational, theoretical, and/or numerical studies that advance our understanding of environmental and ecological responses—from phytoplankton to top-predators—to climate variability and change in coastal shelf-open ocean transitional areas.

Characterized by strong environmental gradients, Transitional Areas (TAs) can occur both offshore or nearshore where fresh and marine waters collide. TAs may have increased habitat heterogeneity that promotes ecosystem structure, function, and biodiversity that maintains ecosystem goods and services for coastal communities (e.g., shoreline protection, fisheries resources). Alternatively, extreme environmental fluctuations may limit biodiversity and resulting ecosystem goods and services. Many countries are implementing conservation measures to protect areas of higher biodiversity and, to ensure longer term conservation objectives are realized, it becomes imperative to understand the specific characteristics of each TA. Further, like other marine ecosystems, TAs are under increasing stress due to climate change and other human-mediated activities (e.g., fisheries, shipping, resource extraction). This is especially true in the coastal zone where habitat loss/degradation, over-exploitation, invasive species, pollution, etc. are prevalent and expected to interact negatively with climate change. Thus, it is expected that species’ distributions will be altered resulting in changes in community composition, biodiversity, and ecosystem structure, function, and services. Additionally, this may lead to a mis-match between existing conservation areas and the biodiversity they were designed to protect. Conservation management need to consider dynamic measures for features such as TAs that are known to have greater spatial and temporal variability. To better understand possible biodiversity changes in TAs this session invites contributions related to: 1) characterization and identification of biodiversity trends in TAs or comparisons to non-TAs; 2) identification of major drivers of biodiversity change in TAs, including mechanistic and experimental approaches; 3) forecasts of change in TAs, including species distribution models or adaptive variation; and 4) potential implications related to conservation management or policy development.

Coastal habitats represent the transition between the open oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. These are typically highly productive systems, where many types of both marine and terrestrial organisms, spanning multiple trophic levels reproduce, nurse, and feed. Coastal ecosystems support multiple physical and biological processes, support regulation of hydrology and climate, and provide food and coastal protection from storms and sea level rise. As the boundary between terrestrial and ocean ecosystems, they face multiple challenges from human presence and their activities in recreation, tourism, habitat modification, resource extraction, and waste disposal. All of these are important stressors and are increasingly and potentially interacting in ways not yet known. In essence, coastal systems are dominated by both major commercial interests and ecological concern about the sustained integrity, biodiversity and quality of an important interface that is increasingly threatened by human behavior. Issues of concern are changes in nutrient dynamics/availability, possibly leading to nearshore eutrophication and/or hypoxia, changes in species composition and/or productivity, and more frequent or persistent HAB events. This session welcomes contributions dealing with the role of coastal systems in terms of 1) their use by oceanic species for refuge, reproduction and feeding, 2) carbon and energy dynamics, 3) the impact of stressors in altering coastal habitats and their suitability to provided needed ecosystem functions, and 4) ecosystem services including fisheries and tourism.