Harmful algal blooms and climate change: Learning from the past and present to forecast the future

• Main Authors: Wells, ML, Trainer, VL, Smayda, TJ, Karlson, BSO, Trick, CG, Kudela, RM, Ishikawa, A, Bernard, Stewart, Wulff, A, Anderson, DM, Cochlan, WP
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2015
• Subjects: Harmful algal blooms; HAB; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10204/8623; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568988315300615

Copyright: 2015 Elsevier. Due to copyright restrictions, the attached PDF file only contains the abstract of the full text item. For access to the full text item, please consult the publisher's website. For access to the full text item, please consult the publisher's website. The definitive version of the work is published in Harmful Algae, Vol 49, pp. 68-93 Climate change pressures will influence marine planktonic systems globally, and it is conceivable that harmful algal blooms may increase in frequency and severity. These pressures will be manifest as alterations in temperature, stratification, light, ocean acidification, precipitation-induced nutrient inputs, and grazing, but absence of fundamental knowledge of the mechanisms driving harmful algal blooms frustrates most hope of forecasting their future prevalence. Summarized here is the consensus of a recent workshop held to address what currently is known and not known about the environmental conditions that favor initiation and maintenance of harmful algal blooms. There is expectation that harmful algal bloom (HAB) geographical domains should expand in some cases, as will seasonal windows of opportunity for harmful algal blooms at higher latitudes. Nonetheless there is only basic information to speculate upon which regions or habitats HAB species may be the most resilient or susceptible. Moreover, current research strategies are not well suited to inform these fundamental linkages. There is a critical absence of tenable hypotheses for how climate pressures mechanistically affect HAB species, and the lack of uniform experimental protocols limits the quantitative cross-investigation comparisons essential to advancement. A HAB “best practices” manual would help foster more uniform research strategies and protocols, and selection of a small target list of model HAB species or isolates for study would greatly promote the accumulation of knowledge. Despite the need to focus on keystone species, more studies need to address strain variability within species, ...