Climate change and deepening of the North Sea fish assemblage: a biotic indicator of warming seas

1 Climate change impacts have been observed on individual species and species subsets; however, it remains to be seen whether there are systematic, coherent assemblage-wide responses to climate change that could be used as a representative indicator of changing biological state. 2 European shelf seas are warming faster than the adjacent land masses and faster than the global average. We explore the year-by-year distributional response of North Sea bottom-dwelling (demersal) fishes to temperature change over the 25 years from 1980 to 2004. The centres of latitudinal and depth distributions of 28 fishes were estimated from species-abundance–location data collected on an annual fish monitoring survey. 3…

• ES
  Ecological Society of America
• RS
  Royal Society
• BE
  British Ecological Society
• UO
  University of Oxford
• EC
  European Commission
• IC
  International Council for the Exploration of the Sea
• NE
  Natural Environment Research Council