Marine Arctic Resilience, Adaptations and Transformations

MARAT is an interdisciplinary and international research project supported by the Belmont Forum and is recommended to be funded by the National Science Foundation. It is in collaboration with Juan Rocha , Susa Niiranen, Jean-Sébastien Moore, Marianne Falardeau, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Elena Bennett, and Garry Peterson.

Arctic marine food webs are changing at unprecedented rates and it is uncertain how species will adapt, how new ecological configurations will emerge, and how communities dependent on marine resources will cope with change. This project will integrate models, local knowledge, and comparative case studies to assess the resilience of Arctic marine food webs to climate and fishing pressures, and how communities adapt or transform to such changes. The project will use methods and theories from the natural and social sciences, as well as integrating perspectives from local communities, national governmental agencies and multilateral institutions all focused on sustainable fisheries. 

Our work will be divided in four work packages (WPs). WP1 will develop a generic food web model that takes into account biological relevant features of Arctic marine food webs. We will then focus on two in-depth case studies, one in Nunavut, Canada (WP2) and another on salmon fisheries in Alaska (WP3). In Nunavut we will study how indigenous local knowledge and scientific understanding can inform adaptive co-management practices. In Alaska we will explore the tradeoffs among commercial, touristic and subsistence fisheries of salmon and the response of its wild and domesticated populations to climate change. In WP4 we develop tools to assess the adaptive and transformative capacities of Arctic communities to changes in their marine environments. We will expand previous efforts of the Arctic Resilience Report to upscale the resilience assessment of the Arctic. Our four work packages together will provide insights on how marine food webs are changing in the Arctic, and what opportunities and challenges they pose to governing agencies and local communities depending on marine ecosystem services. 

More information on the project and my collaborators is available here