Project overview

Pershing, Andrew

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Our project is in the process of synthesizing available data sets to investigate the impact of basin scale forcing on Northwest Atlantic Shelf ecosystems. To broaden this effort beyond our research program, we organized the third CAFÉ (Climate-based Assessments and Forecasts for Ecosystems) Gulf of Maine Workshop. The workshop focused on connections between the Arctic and NW Atlantic and the origin of 1990s freshwater anomalies and their impacts on the NW Atlantic Shelf. In addition to a summary of the workshop, Andrew Pershing and David Mountain presented updates on project research. Dr. Mountain described changes in the recruitment/egg for cod and haddock between the U.S. GLOBEC (late 1990s) and MARMAP (1980s) periods. Between the 1980s and 1990s, the slope of the relationship between recruitment and number of eggs of cod decreased, while the slope for haddock increased. This suggests that conditions in the 1990s were more favorable for haddock than cod. He then emphasized that the biggest difference between the 1980s and 1990s is the presence of freshwater in the 1990s. Underscoring the connection between the Gulf of Maine and processes in the Labrador Sea, he demonstrated an association between Labrador Current transport and salinity anomalies on Georges Bank. Dr. Pershing then presented some preliminary results from an analysis of the continuous plankton recorder (CPR) data from the Mid-Atlantic Bight. As in the Gulf of Maine, there were strong differences between the 1980s and 1990s; however, the abundance of most species in the Mid Atlantic did not return to pre-1990 levels as did those in the Gulf of Maine. The analysis of the CPR data will hopefully be expanded to included data from the Canadian Shelf.


Last Modified: April 24, 2007