FPU2023-Unravelling the resilience of global marine resources to climate change and exploitation

The escalating severity of climate change has thrust humanity in a critical juncture, where the unsettling ecological repercussions –many of which are currently emerging or remain unknown– exert both short- and long-term pressure on global marine resources that may be even more pervasive for exploited populations. Consequently, understanding how ecological systems can endure this environmental changes under fishing is a major challenge, demanding the integration of applied science for effective ocean management. In this sense, ‘resilience’, the capacity of ecological systems to resist and recover from disturbances, has become a conceptual cornerstone in marine management gaining prominence as a narrative for conservation optimism. This term serves as means to articulate ecosystem health and the capacity to overcome both natural and anthropogenic disturbances. However, the popularity of resilience has grown in parallel with the number of definitions and metrics to quantify it, ultimately hampering our understanding of “what makes a given species resilient”. We propose a PhD Project to fill this knowledge gap aiming to better understand how populations across a diversity of life history traits, global ecosystems and under different exploitation regimes display contrasting resilience capacities. The project will use extensive demographic information from large databases of assessed marine populations at a global scale together with well-s