Integrating Ecological and Genomic Diversity for Climate Resilient Marine Spatial Planning

Rising temperatures, ocean acidification, deoxygenation, and changing sea levels severely stress marine environments. These stressors, compounded by anthropogenic activities such as pollution, habitat destruction, and overfishing profoundly threaten marine biodiversity and disrupt essential ecosystem functions, including food provision, carbon cycling and climate regulation. The resulting loss of biodiversity weakens the resilience of marine systems, undermining their ability to adapt to further change. Considering these threats on the oceans, habitat restoration and conservation of biodiversity is vital. However, managers face the challenge of prioritizing areas and species for protection in the face of complex and interacting threats. Addressing this challenge requires an evaluation of the current and potential impacts of climate change. To evaluate those impacts, our understanding of climate change vulnerability must grow not only on species but also on the community and ecosystem levels.

We tackle the question of how biodiversity can be preserved in a changing climate through spatial planning and habitat restoration. We use an ecosystem engineering species, sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima), both as target species, and as ecosystem indicator. We investigate its genomic diversity and climate change vulnerability where we will combine this information with an evaluation of sugar kelp associated community diversity through eDNA data from a range of locations. We will make predictions of species and population vulnerability to future climate change through genome scans, genotype-environment associations and connectivity assessments.