Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Managing Ocean Front Ecosystems for Climate Change

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

The project seeks to establish the relation between the fish resources and ocean fronts – areas where two distinct water masses meet in the oceans - and utilize that knowledge to understand how the fronts and the fishery related to them will change under different scenarios of changing climate. The project will focus on the Mozambique Channel where ocean front ecosystems are continually being formed and reformed.

This area plays an important role in the well-being and livelihoods of many people in the area who depend on these fisheries and ocean ecosystem. Exploitation of the fisheries at these fronts poses a threat to the fisheries resources which tend to concentrate in slowly sinking waters of the frontal zone thus making them vulnerable to over-exploitation.

To maintain sustainable social and natural ecosystems, it is critical to understand how these frontal ecosystems and their marine fauna and flora will be affected by changing climate. This project will utilize existing satellite data from the Mozambique Channel to develop models that advance understanding of ocean fronts, and illuminate temporal and spatial dynamics of marine life using front ecosystems, including species important to commercial fisheries and to conservation.

The results will improve management of tropical fisheries and improve conservation of large marine animals including dolphin, whales, manta rays, sharks and whale sharks. These results will directly benefit conservation and fisheries in the Mozambique channel and will inform improved management in similar systems throughout the tropics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.