Extending Vulnerability Assessment to Include Life Stages Considerations.

ABSTRACT: Species are experiencing a suite of novel stressors from anthropogenic activities that have impacts at multiple scales. Vulnerability assessment is one tool to evaluate the likely impacts that these stressors pose to species so that high-vulnerability cases can be identified and prioritized for monitoring, protection, or mitigation. Commonly used semi-quantitative methods lack a framework to explicitly account for differences in exposure to stressors and organism responses across life stages. Here we propose a modification to commonly used spatial vulnerability assessment methods that includes such an approach, using ocean acidification in the California Current as an illustrative case study. Life stage considerations were included by assessing vulnerability of each life stage to ocean aci

SUBMITTER: Hodgson EE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4945077 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature