Publications

Kininmonth, S.; Blenckner, T.; Niiranen, S.; Watson, J.; Orio, A.; Casini, M.; Neuenfeldt, S.; Bartolino, V.; Hansson, M. 2022. Is Diversity the Missing Link in Coastal Fisheries Management? Diversity, 14, 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/d14020090

Fisheries management has historically focused on the population elasticity of target fish based primarily on demographic modeling, with the key assumptions of stability in environmental conditions and static trophic relationships. The predictive capacity of this fisheries framework is poor, especially in closed systems where the benthic diversity and boundary effects are important and the stock levels are low. Here, we presen...

Ammar, Y., Voss, R., Niiranen, S. & Blenckner, T. 2021. Quantifying socio-economic novelty in fisheries social-ecological systems. Fish and Fisheries doi.org/10.1111/faf.12626

Socio-economic development has shaped fisheries social-ecological systems (SES) worldwide across different scales. No work has yet undertaken how this development led to novel, not experienced before, systems structure in marine SES. Here, we quantify socio-economic novelty as the degree of dissimilarity relative to a specific spatiotemporal baseline in the Baltic Sea fisheries SES between 1975 and 2015. We used catch by "gear...

Blenckner, T., Ammar, Y., Müller-Karulis, B., Niiranen, S., Arneborg, L., Li, Q.. 2021. The Risk for Novel and Disappearing Environmental Conditions in the Baltic Sea. Frontiers in Marine Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.745722

Future climate biogeochemical projections indicate large changes in the ocean with environmental conditions not experienced at present referred to as novel, or may even disappear. These climate-induced changes will most likely affect species distribution via changes in growth, behavior, evolution, dispersal, and species interactions. However, the future risk of novel and disappearing environmental conditions in the ocean is po...

Ammar, Y., Niiranen, S., Otto, S.A., Möllmann, C., Finsinger, W. and Blenckner, T., 2021. The rise of novelty in marine ecosystems: The Baltic Sea case. Global change biology, 27(7), pp.1485-1499

Global environmental changes have accelerated at an unprecedented rate in recent decades due to human activities. As a consequence, the incidence of novel abiotic conditions and biotic communities, which have been continuously emerging in the Earth system, has rapidly risen. Despite growing attention to the incidence and challenges posed by novelty in terrestrial ecosystems, novelty has not yet been quantified in marine ecosys...

Otto, S.A., Niiranen, S., Blenckner, T., Tomczak, M.T., Müller-Karulis, B., Rubene, G. and Möllmann, C., 2020. Life Cycle Dynamics of a Key Marine Species Under Multiple Stressors. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, p.296.

Identifying key indicator species, their life cycle dynamics and the multiple driving forces they are affected by is an important step in ecosystem-based management. Similarly important is understanding how environmental changes and trophic interactions shape future trajectories of key species with potential implications for ecosystem state and service provision. We here present a statistical modeling framework to assess and q...

Neuenfeldt, S., Bartolino, V., Orio, A., Andersen, K.H., Andersen, N.G., Niiranen, S., Bergström, U., Ustups, D., Kulatska, N. and Casini, M., 2020. Feeding and growth of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua L.) in the eastern Baltic Sea under environmental change. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 77(2), pp.624-632.

Five decades of stomach content data allowed insight into the development of consumption, diet composition, and resulting somatic growth of Gadus morhua (Atlantic cod) in the eastern Baltic Sea. We show a recent reversal in feeding level over body length. Present feeding levels of small cod indicate severe growth limitation and increased starvation-related mortality. For young cod, the low growth rate and the high mortalit...

Niiranen S., Orio A., Bartolino V., Bergström U., et.al. 2019. Predator-prey body size relationships of cod in a low-diversity marine system. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 627:201-206. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13098

How predators select their prey largely defines ecosystem trophic structure, function and dynamics. In aquatic systems, organism body size is an important trait explaining predator-prey interactions. Here, we used a unique Atlantic cod Gadus morhua stomach content dataset with diet information from over 100000 individuals collected from the Baltic Sea in 1963-2014, to explore prey size distribution and predator-prey mass ra...

Kadin, M., Frederiksen, M., Niiranen, S., Converse, S.J. 2019. Linking demographic and food‐web models to understand management trade‐offs. Ecology and Evolution https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5385

Alternatives in ecosystem‐based management often differ with respect to trade‐offs between ecosystem values. Ecosystem or food‐web models and demographic models are typically employed to evaluate alternatives, but the approaches are rarely integrated to uncover conflicts between values. We applied multistate models to a capture–recapture dataset on common guillemots Uria aalge breeding in the Baltic Sea to identify factors in...

Lotze, H.K., Tittensor, D.P., Bryndum-Buchholz, A., Eddy, T.D. et. al. 2019. Global ensemble projections reveal trophic amplification of ocean biomass declines with climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2019, 201900194; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1900194116

While the physical dimensions of climate change are now routinely assessed through multimodel intercomparisons, projected impacts on the global ocean ecosystem generally rely on individual models with a specific set of assumptions. To address these single-model limitations, we present standardized ensemble projections from six global marine ecosystem models forced with two Earth system models and four emission scenarios with a...

Planque B., Mullon C., Arneberg P., et al. 2019. A participatory scenario method to explore the future of marine social‐ecological systems. Fish Fish. 2019;00:1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12356

Anticipating future changes in marine social‐ecological systems (MSES) several decades into the future is essential in the context of accelerating global change. This is challenging in situations where actors do not share common understandings, practices, or visions about the future. We introduce a dedicated scenario method for the development of MSES scenarios in a participatory context. The objective is to allow different ac...