From FishBio:
“Keep it simple” is a commonly applied principle of design, but when it comes to ecosystems “keep it complicated” may be the better approach. Ecologists have long hypothesized that simplification of ecosystems reduces the climate resiliency of those ecosystems and the species that live in them. This process has proved challenging to document, but the extensive development, simplification, and degradation of California’s ecosystems over the past 170 years coupled with extensive monitoring data on the state’s salmon fishery provides an ideal opportunity to investigate this hypothesis.
Researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service recently leveraged this opportunity to search for empirical evidence of decreasing climate resilience in the California salmon fishery over the industrial era (Munsch et al. 2022). Their findings suggest that salmon populations of the past could weather unfavorable years by diffusing the impacts across diverse habitats, life histories, and time; however, human-driven homogenization of habitats and life histories has made the fishery of today far less resilient to an increasingly erratic climate.
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