At the age of five, I began spending summers at my grandfather鈥檚 house on Cape Cod, where he taught me to fish in a small pond down the street from his house. When I was ten, my father bought a small boat, and we began fishing in the waters that surround the Elizabeth Islands. Countless hours spent fishing in these waters sparked my deep interest in the area鈥檚 ecosystems and the many fish species that live there. As a kid learning to catch striped bass and bluefish, I was unaware of the possibility that these fish might not always exist in the waters surrounding the islands. The Northeast Shelf Regional Ecosystem (NSRE), the ecosystem that contains these waters, is warming faster than the rest of the global ocean. As the water continues to warm, many fish species are moving north to follow their preferred temperature range, shifting out of their historical community. My research aims to assess how these distribution changes are going to impact the future diversity of biological traits that are possessed by the species within each NSRE fish community. This metric, termed functional diversity, is crucial to assess in the face of climate change and mass extinction because changes in functional diversity can provide signs of disturbance prior to species loss. Decreases in functional diversity can also reduce a community鈥檚 resilience to future disturbance. I hope that the findings of this research will allow conservation managers to better prioritize NSRE fish communities that could suffer the greatest diversity and resilience losses in the future.
