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SOMBEE
Scenarios Of Marine Biodiversity and Evolution under Exploitation and climate change
Global changes, including climate change and the growing demand for seafood, are driving marine ecosystems towards unprecedented states that require devising adaptation and mitigation strategies. Scenarios and models are invaluable tools to guide long-term strategic policies. However, although the degree of scenarios’ realism has greatly improved, the Darwinian evolution of fish populations is still neglected in future projections. Fish evolution and adaptation could mitigate the impacts of global change on fish populations and prevent their extirpation, an evolutionary rescue. But it could also push them towards evolutionary traps due to the erosion of their genetic diversity and thus reduce their evolutionary potential and resilience.
SOMBEE is designed to advance our capacity to forecast future changes in marine fish biodiversity. It addresses the role of eco-evolutionary dynamics and their consequences for the sustainable exploitation of fish resources in the future. The key open question addressed is whether exploited fish populations have the capacity of adapting swiftly enough to global change to ensure their persistence and their sustainable exploitation.