Meeting report. Frontiers of marine science T. J. Webb & E. S. Poloczanska 325 How will ﬁsh populations respond to climate change? reconstruction of past climate palaeoecological studies of species diversity global and regional climate model projections instrumental records models of thermohaline circulation species distribution modelling habitat mapping biodiversity surveys remote sensing archaeology ﬁsheries statistics historical population projections anecdote predictive ecosystem models How will the marine climate change? How are ﬁsh distributions related to the environment? What other factors affect ﬁsh populations? years ago 108 107 106 105 104 103 102 101 100 NOW 100 101 102 years in the future Figure 1. Questions in marine science are inherently interdisciplinary. For example, to address the question, How will ﬁsh popu- lations respond to climate change? requires an understanding of climate past, present and future, and how environmental factors such as ocean chemistry, productivity and physical forcing inﬂuence the current distributions of ﬁsh and their predators and prey. In addition, understanding of other pressures on ﬁsh populations will be essential. These may include past and present exploitation in ﬁsheries as well as probable responses to a range of policy scenarios, and may involve the complementary exper- tise of archaeologists, historians, social and political scientists. Each of these different disciplines will bring its own methods, including both empirical and modelling approaches. This interdisciplinary approach covers the requisite range of scales in space (from individual ﬁsh populations to global climate) and time (from deep time to the near future). analogous extant species to inform their understanding of the fossil and sub-fossil record. One of the chal- lenges highlighted at the meeting is the need to extend the temporal and spatial coverage of retrospec- tive data. Such data are required by climate system models, in order to enhance our understanding of cli- mate system dynamics, and by ecosystem models which aim to predict climate impacts. Whole ecosys- tem models can also be used to simulate conditions in the past or produce predictions of the future. Such models can simulate the state of ecosystems without exploitation or other anthropogenic pressures, con- ditions often beyond our data records, so expanding our understanding of key processes [12]. (c) Methods A major message from this meeting was the inter- dependence of theoretical and empirical approaches. Models have been developed across a variety of scales to give a global picture (e.g. physical and biological oceanography, modelling ocean- or global-scale circu- lation) or more complex local detail (e.g. eddy-scale processes, ecosystem dynamics). But the importance of empirical studies remains key, for verifying model predictions, for deriving parameter estimates and for suggesting future theoretical developments. Coordi- nated large-scale empirical programmes in the marine environment have been designed to improve the spatial coverage of our understanding of patterns in the biodiversity (e.g. the Census of Marine Life, www. coml.org) and chemical composition of the oceans (e.g. GEOTRACES, www.geotraces.org) as well as to document the history of the Earth system (e.g. the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, www.iodp.org). Biol. Lett. (2011) Each of these multinational, multidisciplinary initiat- ives blurs the boundaries between theory and empiricism, with models driving empirical questions, and the resultant data feeding back into improved models of marine systems. A strength of the Frontiers of Science was to bring together modellers and empiri- cists in discussions focused on generic problems, rather than on speciﬁc methodologies. This approach offers the best pathway to understanding the marine environment. 3. PUSHING THE FRONTIERS Marine scientists face the challenges of working in a medium that can be difﬁcult to access and sample, with large areas of the ocean still almost untouched by scientiﬁc surveys, e.g. [13,14]. Nonetheless, this conference highlighted how collaborations and techno- logical advances are pushing the frontiers of marine science. Cutting-edge technologies are allowing us to collect information over large areas (e.g. ocean colour by satellite remote-sensing), thus allowing automated observing of marine life. Metagenomics, which link ‘old’ single-species empirical technologies and ‘new’ molecular biologies at community and ecosystem levels, have the potential to integrate across diverse ﬁelds that may have previously lacked a genetics perspective. The development of the kinds of multinational, interdisciplinary networks of marine researchers described above is rapidly advancing our understanding of the exchanges between oceanic phys- ical and biological processes. Finally, the way we manage the marine environment is changing moving from single-species management to whole-ecosystem