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Targets and limits for long-term management are used in fisheries advice to operationalize the way management reflects societal priorities on ecological, economic, social and institutional aspects. This study reflects on the available published literature as well as new research presented at the international ICES/Myfish symposium on targets and limits for long term fisheries management. We examine the inclusion of ecological, economic, social and institutional objectives in fisheries management, with the aim of progressing towards including all four objectives when setting management targets or limits, or both, for multispecies fisheries. The topics covered include ecological, economic, social and governance objectives in fisheries management, consistent approaches to management, uncertainty and variability, and fisheries governance. We end by identifying ten ways to more effectively include multiple objectives in setting targets and limits in ecosystem based fisheries management. Peer-reviewed. This is a open access article accepted for publication in ICES Journal of Marine Science following peer review. Rindorf, A., Dichmont, C. M., Thorson, J., Charles, A., Clausen, L. W., Degnbol, P., …Reid, D. G. ... Voss, R. (2017). Inclusion of ecological, economic, social, and institutional considerations when setting targets and limits for multispecies fisheries. ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal Du Conseil. https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsw226 is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/74/2/453/2962394 doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsw226

AbstractCold‐water stony corals create habitat for a diverse range of deep‐water species but are thought to be threatened by ocean acidification due to oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2. Knowledge of the severity of this threat is hampered by our limited understanding of the distribution and habitat requirements of these corals. Here we estimate the global acidification threat to these organisms using a global database of cold‐water stony coral records and a species distribution modelling approach. We parameterised the models using present‐day environmental data, and then replaced these data with future projections of ocean chemistry from the year 2099. We found suitable coral habitat to be very heterogeneously distributed, being concentrated in the northern North Atlantic and around New Zealand. Projected changes in ocean chemistry induced a pronounced reduction in habitat suitability in the North Atlantic, and a low‐to‐moderate impact elsewhere under both the IPCC IS92a and S650 scenarios. Seamount summits are impacted by these changes, but consistently provide more suitable habitat than the surrounding seafloor, with around 98% of seamount summits having higher suitability in both future scenarios; this is because they lie in shallower waters with a higher aragonite saturation state. These results suggest that anthropogenic‐induced changes in ocean chemistry are likely to severely impact cold‐water stony coral habitat in the deep‐sea of the North Atlantic, and that impacts will be less severe elsewhere. We predict that coral communities on the summits and upper slopes of seamounts will be less susceptible to ocean acidification during this century than those on the surrounding seafloor, and thus that seamounts may serve as temporary refugia.

AbstractPopulation viability analyses (PVAs) contribute to conservation theory, policy, and management. Most PVAs focus on single species within a given landscape and address a specific problem. This specificity often is reflected in the organization of published PVA descriptions. Many lack structure, making them difficult to understand, assess, repeat, or use for drawing generalizations across PVA studies. In an assessment comparing published PVAs and existing guidelines, we found that model selection was rarely justified; important parameters remained neglected or their implementation was described vaguely; limited details were given on parameter ranges, sensitivity analysis, and scenarios; and results were often reported too inconsistently to enable repeatability and comparability. Although many guidelines exist on how to design and implement reliable PVAs and standards exist for documenting and communicating ecological models in general, there is a lack of organized guidelines for designing, applying, and communicating PVAs that account for their diversity of structures and contents. To fill this gap, we integrated published guidelines and recommendations for PVA design and application, protocols for documenting ecological models in general and individual‐based models in particular, and our collective experience in developing, applying, and reviewing PVAs. We devised a comprehensive protocol for the design, application, and communication of PVAs (DAC‐PVA), which has 3 primary elements. The first defines what a useful PVA is; the second element provides a workflow for the design and application of a useful PVA and highlights important aspects that need to be considered during these processes; and the third element focuses on communication of PVAs to ensure clarity, comprehensiveness, repeatability, and comparability. Thereby, DAC‐PVA should strengthen the credibility and relevance of PVAs for policy and management, and improve the capacity to generalize PVA findings across studies.

Abstract. The Greenland ice sheet is one of the largest contributors to global meansea-level rise today and is expected to continue to lose mass as the Arcticcontinues to warm. The two predominant mass loss mechanisms are increasedsurface meltwater run-off and mass loss associated with the retreat ofmarine-terminating outlet glaciers. In this paper we use a large ensemble ofGreenland ice sheet models forced by output from a representative subset ofthe Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) global climate models to project ice sheet changes and sea-level risecontributions over the 21st century. The simulations are part of theIce Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6 (ISMIP6). We estimate thesea-level contribution together with uncertainties due to future climateforcing, ice sheet model formulations and ocean forcing for the twogreenhouse gas concentration scenarios RCP8.5 and RCP2.6. The resultsindicate that the Greenland ice sheet will continue to lose mass in bothscenarios until 2100, with contributions of 90±50 and 32±17 mm to sea-level rise for RCP8.5 and RCP2.6, respectively. The largestmass loss is expected from the south-west of Greenland, which is governed bysurface mass balance changes, continuing what is already observed today.Because the contributions are calculated against an unforced controlexperiment, these numbers do not include any committed mass loss, i.e. massloss that would occur over the coming century if the climate forcingremained constant. Under RCP8.5 forcing, ice sheet model uncertaintyexplains an ensemble spread of 40 mm, while climate model uncertainty andocean forcing uncertainty account for a spread of 36 and 19 mm,respectively. Apart from those formally derived uncertainty ranges, thelargest gap in our knowledge is about the physical understanding andimplementation of the calving process, i.e. the interaction of the ice sheetwith the ocean. info:eu-repo/semantics/published

We performed a systematic analysis of blood DNA methylation profiles from 4483 participants from seven independent cohorts identifying differentially methylated positions (DMPs) associated with psychosis, schizophrenia, and treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Psychosis cases were characterized by significant differences in measures of blood cell proportions and elevated smoking exposure derived from the DNA methylation data, with the largest differences seen in treatment-resistant schizophrenia patients. We implemented a stringent pipeline to meta-analyze epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) results across datasets, identifying 95 DMPs associated with psychosis and 1048 DMPs associated with schizophrenia, with evidence of colocalization to regions nominated by genetic association studies of disease. Many schizophrenia-associated DNA methylation differences were only present in patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia, potentially reflecting exposure to the atypical antipsychotic clozapine. Our results highlight how DNA methylation data can be leveraged to identify physiological (e.g., differential cell counts) and environmental (e.g., smoking) factors associated with psychosis and molecular biomarkers of treatment-resistant schizophrenia.

AbstractMetagenomics has made accessible an enormous reserve of global biochemical diversity. To tap into this vast resource of novel enzymes, we have screened over one million clones from metagenome DNA libraries derived from sixteen different environments for carboxylesterase activity and identified 714 positive hits. We have validated the esterase activity of 80 selected genes, which belong to 17 different protein families including unknown and cyclase-like proteins. Three metagenomic enzymes exhibited lipase activity, and seven proteins showed polyester depolymerization activity against polylactic acid and polycaprolactone. Detailed biochemical characterization of four new enzymes revealed their substrate preference, whereas their catalytic residues were identified using site-directed mutagenesis. The crystal structure of the metal-ion dependent esterase MGS0169 from the amidohydrolase superfamily revealed a novel active site with a bound unknown ligand. Thus, activity-centered metagenomics has revealed diverse enzymes and novel families of microbial carboxylesterases, whose activity could not have been predicted using bioinformatics tools.