OpenChannels Literature Update Archives

For the week of 16 April 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Fisheries has published, Social Media for Fisheries Science and Management Professionals: How to Use It and Why You Should. "Social media has revolutionized how people communicate with one another. This has important implications for science, environmental advocacy, and natural resource management, with numerous documented professional benefits for people in each of these fields. Some fisheries management professionals have been wary of social media use, in no small part due to unfamiliarity. The goal of this paper is to summarize the professional benefits of social media usage that are applicable for fisheries science and management professionals and to provide a detailed guide for those who wish to get started. Though many Web 2.0 tools exist, this paper will focus on the use of Facebook, Twitter, and blogs."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-04-18. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

For the week of 09 April 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Ecological Indicators has published, A modelling framework for MSP-oriented cumulative effects assessment. "This research presents a comprehensive Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA) based on the Tools4MSP modelling framework tested for the Italian Adriatic Sea."

We also have a few new MarXiv summaries, including:

• Taking home-ranges into account for Mediterranean MPAs could offer increased recovery benefits.

• Beating the Microbead: How private environmental governance has influenced the regulatory process of banning microbeads in the UK.

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-04-11. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

For the week of 26 March 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Frontiers in Marine Science has published, Fishermen Follow Fine-Scale Physical Ocean Features for Finance. "The seascapes on which many millions of people make their living and secure food have complex and dynamic spatial features—the figurative hills and valleys—that influence where and how people work at sea. Here, we quantify the physical mosaic of the surface ocean by identifying Lagrangian Coherent Structures for a whole seascape—the U.S. California Current Large Marine Ecosystem—and assess their impact on the spatial distribution of fishing. We observe that there is a mixed response: some fisheries track these physical features, and others avoid them. These spatial behaviors map to economic impacts, in particular we find that tuna fishermen can expect to make three times more revenue per trip if fishing occurs on strong Lagrangian Coherent Structures. However, we find no relationship for salmon and pink shrimp fishing trips. These results highlight a connection between the biophysical state of the oceans, the spatial patterns of human activity, and ultimately the economic welfare of coastal communities."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-03-28. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

P.S. Next week we will have half a table at the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference in Seattle. Come by and find us if you're there! 

For the week of 12 March 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Nature Communications has published, Marine spatial planning makes room for offshore aquaculture in crowded coastal waters. "Marine spatial planning (MSP) seeks to reduce conflicts and environmental impacts, and promote sustainable use of marine ecosystems. Existing MSP approaches have successfully determined how to achieve target levels of ocean area for particular uses while minimizing costs and impacts, but they do not provide a framework that derives analytical solutions in order to co-ordinate siting of multiple uses while balancing the effects of planning on each sector in the system. We develop such a framework for guiding offshore aquaculture (bivalve, finfish, and kelp farming) development in relation to existing sectors and environmental concerns (wild-capture fisheries, viewshed quality, benthic pollution, and disease spread) in California, USA. We identify > 250,000 MSP solutions that generate significant seafood supply and billions of dollars in revenue with minimal impacts (often < 1%) on existing sectors and the environment. We filter solutions to identify candidate locations for high-value, low-impact aquaculture development. Finally, we confirm the expectation of substantial value of our framework over conventional planning focused on maximizing individual objectives."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-03-14. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

P.S. OCTO is at the 6IMDC in San Diego this week! Look out for MarineDebris.org totes and MarXiv stickers (if there are any left).

For the week of 05 March 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Scientific Reports has published, Assessing cetacean surveys throughout the Mediterranean Sea: a gap analysis in environmental space. "Heterogeneous data collection in the marine environment has led to large gaps in our knowledge of marine species distributions. To fill these gaps, models calibrated on existing data may be used to predict species distributions in unsampled areas, given that available data are sufficiently representative. Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility of mapping cetacean densities across the entire Mediterranean Sea using models calibrated on available survey data and various environmental covariates. We aggregated 302,481 km of line transect survey effort conducted in the Mediterranean Sea within the past 20 years by many organisations. Survey coverage was highly heterogeneous geographically and seasonally: large data gaps were present in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and in non-summer months. We mapped the extent of interpolation versus extrapolation and the proportion of data nearby in environmental space when models calibrated on existing survey data were used for prediction across the entire Mediterranean Sea. Using model predictions to map cetacean densities in the eastern and southern Mediterranean, characterised by warmer, less productive waters, and more intense eddy activity, would lead to potentially unreliable extrapolations. We stress the need for systematic surveys of cetaceans in these environmentally unique Mediterranean waters, particularly in non-summer months."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-03-07. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

For the week of 26 February 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Marine Policy has published, The ‘presentist bias’ in time-series data: Implications for fisheries science and policy. "The bias in catch time series data that occurs when improvements in fisheries catch reporting systems (e.g., consideration of a previously unmonitored fishery, or region) lead to an increase in current catches without the corresponding past catches being corrected retroactively, here called ‘presentist bias’ is described, and two examples, pertaining to Mozambique and Tanzania are given. This bias has the effect of generating catch time series at the aggregate that appear ‘stable’ or increasing when in fact catches are declining over time, with potentially serious consequences for the assessment of the status of national fisheries, or in interpreting the global landings data disseminated by the FAO. The presentist bias can be compensated for by retroactive national data corrections as done, e.g., through catch reconstructions."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-02-28. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

P.S. Three new summaries are available on MarXiv. Read about: adopting indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of MPAs, using marine reserves to battle climate change at low-cost, and how acoustics can aid fisheries management. Find them here! 

P.P.S. The Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI) has created a collection of Deep Sea Mining literature. Check it out on Mendeley. 

For the week of 19 February 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published, Climate for women in climate science: Women scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an authoritative and influential source of reports on climate change. The lead authors of IPCC reports include scientists from around the world, but questions have been raised about the dominance of specific disciplines in the report and the disproportionate number of scholars from the Global North. In this paper, we analyze the as-yet-unexamined issue of gender and IPCC authorship, looking at changes in gender balance over time and analyzing women’s views about their experience and barriers to full participation, not only as women but also at the intersection of nationality, race, command of English, and discipline. Over time, we show that the proportion of female IPCC authors has seen a modest increase from less than 5% in 1990 to more than 20% in the most recent assessment reports. Based on responses from over 100 women IPCC authors, we find that many women report a positive experience in the way in which they are treated and in their ability to influence the report, although others report that some women were poorly represented and heard. We suggest that an intersectional lens is important: not all women experience the same obstacles: they face multiple and diverse barriers associated with social identifiers such as race, nationality, command of English, and disciplinary affiliation. The scientific community benefits from including all scientists, including women and those from the Global South. This paper documents barriers to participation and identifies opportunities to diversify climate science."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-02-21. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

P.S. OCTO is celebrating its one year anniversary of tallying the total cost to purchase or rent the full text of each academic article added to our literature library. As of this week the cost has reached approximately US $37,531.75. See more here. 

For the week of 12 February 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Animal Conservation has published, Hand feeding can periodically fuel a major portion of bull shark energy requirements at a provisioning site in Fiji. "Wildlife tourism is often extolled for its contribution to conservation. However, understanding the effects of tourism activities on the health of target animals is required to fully assess conservation benefits. Shark tourism operators often use food rewards to attract sharks in close proximity to tourists, but nothing is known about the contribution of these food rewards to the energetic requirements of target species. In this study, hand feeding of bull sharks Carcharhinus leucas was directly observed on 36 commercial shark watching dives in the Shark Reef Marine Reserve (SRMR), Fiji. Mean number of tuna heads consumed per dive by focal individuals ranged from 1.3 to 3.7. Monitored bull sharks consumed an average of ~0.74 heads per provisioning day, and bioenergetics modelling suggests that some sharks might periodically be meeting their full energy requirement from provisioning at the SRMR. Knowing how much individual sharks consume at provisioning sites and how this relates to their energy requirements is crucial in order to better understand the effects of wildlife tourism and its contribution to conservation."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-02-14. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

P.S. OCTO will be at AGU's Ocean Sciences Meeting this week in Portland, Oregon. If you're around, come visit our booth in the exhibition center – we'll have OpenChannels and MarXiv swag on-hand!

For the week of 05 February 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

PLOS ONE has published, A user-friendly tool to evaluate the effectiveness of no-take marine reserves. "Marine reserves are implemented to achieve a variety of objectives, but are seldom rigorously evaluated to determine whether those objectives are met. In the rare cases when evaluations do take place, they typically focus on ecological indicators and ignore other relevant objectives such as socioeconomics and governance. And regardless of the objectives, the diversity of locations, monitoring protocols, and analysis approaches hinder the ability to compare results across case studies. Moreover, analysis and evaluation of reserves is generally conducted by outside researchers, not the reserve managers or users, plausibly thereby hindering effective local management and rapid response to change. We present a framework and tool, called “MAREA”, to overcome these challenges. Its purpose is to evaluate the extent to which any given reserve has achieved its stated objectives. MAREA provides specific guidance on data collection and formatting, and then conducts rigorous causal inference analysis based on data input by the user, providing real-time outputs about the effectiveness of the reserve. MAREA’s ease of use, standardization of state-of-the-art inference methods, and ability to analyze marine reserve effectiveness across ecological, socioeconomic, and governance objectives could dramatically further our understanding and support of effective marine reserve management."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-02-07. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard

P.S. OCTO will be at AGU's Ocean Sciences Meeting next week in Portland, Oregon. If you're around, come visit our booth in the exhibition center – we'll have OpenChannels and MarXiv swag on-hand!

P.P.S. If you're the author of a paper published by SpringerNature, you might want to read this. Turns out SpringerNature isn't allowing anyone to simply email the corresponding author, making it near impossible to request a copy of your paper for non-subscribers.

For the week of 29 January 2018

Greetings OpenChannels Community Members,

Marine Policy has published, A vision for marine fisheries in a global blue economy. "A brief history of marine fisheries is presented which emphasizes the expansion of industrial fleets in the 20th century, and their inherent lack of sustainability. In contrast, small scale fisheries, i.e. artisanal, subsistence and recreational fisheries could become part of a blue economy, given that care is taken to reduce incentives for building up fishing effort. However, they usually receive little attention from policy makers, as reflected by the almost complete absence from the catch data submitted by member countries to the FAO. While industrial fisheries tend to lack the features that would make them compatible with a blue economy, small-scale fisheries possess most of these features, and thus may represent the future of sustainable fisheries."

As always, if we've missed anything, please feel free to let us know. You may simply reply to this message, or you may email Allie directly at abrown [at] openchannels.org (.)

You can read everything (not just the free stuff) we have found this week at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-update/2018-01-31. Additionally, you can browse literature by the week we've added it at https://www.openchannels.org/literature-by-week.

-Allie Brown and Raye Evrard