Evaluating and Ranking the Vulnerability of Global Marine Ecosystems to Anthropogenic Threats

Marine ecosystems are threatened by a suite of anthropogenic stressors. Mitigating multiple threats is a daunting task, particularly when funding constraints limit the number of threats that can be addressed. Threats are typically assessed and prioritized via expert opinion workshops that often leave no record of the rationale for decisions, making it difficult to update recommendations with new information. We devised a transparent, repeatable, and modifiable method for collecting expert opinion that describes and documents how threats affect marine ecosystems. Experts were asked to assess the functional impact, scale, and frequency of a threat to an ecosystem; the resistance and recovery time of an ecosystem…