DOI: 10.5061/dryad.547d7wm9d
title: Data for: Social-ecological vulnerability of fishing communities to climate change: a U.S. West Coast case study

description: Climate change is already impacting coastal communities, and ongoing and
 future shifts in fisheries species productivity from climate change have
 implications for the livelihoods and cultures of coastal communities.
 Harvested marine species in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem
 support U.S. West Coast communities economically, socially, and
 culturally. Ecological vulnerability assessments exist for individual
 species in the California Current but ecological and human vulnerability
 are linked and vulnerability is expected to vary by community. Here, we
 present automatable, reproducible methods for assessing the vulnerability
 of U.S. West Coast fishing-dependent communities to climate change within
 a social-ecological vulnerability framework. We first assessed the
 ecological risk of marine resources, on which fishing communities rely, to
 50 years of climate change projections. We then combined this with the
 adaptive capacity of fishing communities, based on social indicators, to
 assess the potential ability of communities to cope with future changes.
 Specific communities (particularly in Washington state) were determined to
 be at risk to climate change mainly due to economic reliance on at risk
 marine fisheries species, like salmon, hake, or sea urchins. But, due to
 higher social adaptive capacity, these communities were often not found to
 be the most vulnerable overall. Conversely, certain communities that were
 not the most at risk, ecologically and economically, ranked in the
 category of highly vulnerable communities due to low adaptive capacity
 based on social indicators (particularly in Southern California). Certain
 communities were both ecologically at risk due to catch composition and
 socially vulnerable (low adaptive capacity) leading to the highest tier of
 vulnerability. The integration of climatic, ecological, economic, and
 societal data reveals that factors underlying vulnerability are variable
 across fishing communities on the U.S West Coast, and suggests the need to
 develop a variety of well-aligned strategies to adapt to the ecological
 impacts of climate change.
description: Much of the relevant data are within the
 manuscript and its Supporting Information files, including values
 calculated in this paper such as ecological sensitivity, exposure, risk,
 and community exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and
 vulnerability. Certain data
 underlying the above values presented in the study are publicly
 available: Aquamaps:
 https://www.aquamaps.org/ for
 species ranges to determine ecological risk or by contacting Aquamaps at
 info.aquamaps@gmail.com and are not replicated here. Additional raster files needed to construct species range files are available here through the GitHub page cited in this paper: O'Hara CC, Afflerbach JC, Scarborough C, Kaschner K, Halpern BS. Aligning marine species range data to better serve science and conservation. PLoS One. 2017 May 3;12(5):e0175739. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175739 and at the associated git repository https://github.com/OHI-Science/IUCN-AquaMaps (used as part of the code to rasterize species range data available at the time of publication on GitHub here: https://github.com/koehnl/CommunityVuln_PlosOne). Social metric data for calculating adaptive capacity for communities are available through the CDC here: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/data_documentation_download.html and therefore not replicated here. The summarized tables of climate variables experienced by species in their ranges (output from the climate models), needed to calculate ecological exposure, sensitivity, and risk, are available in this repository submission. The underlying physical and biogeochemical variables from the downscaled projections are available upon request from authors Mike Jacox at NOAA (michael.jacox@noaa.gov) or Jerome Fiechter at UC Santa Cruz (fiechter@ucsc.edu). Confidential vessel-level landings data may be acquired by direct request from the Pacific Fisheries Information Network (PacFIN) (https://pacfin.psmfc.org/) or the Departments of Fish and Wildlife in California, Oregon, and Washington, subject to a non-disclosure agreement. Aggregated data used to determine top species landed for each community and percent revenue from each species for each community, and all associated R code will be publicly available at the time of publication at https://github.com/koehnl/CommunityVuln_PlosOne for R code and this repository submission for aggregated data (aggregated landings by ports can also be found here https://reports.psmfc.org/pacfin/f?p=501:1000:::::: and go to “All species by port group”. Values for community reliance (from NOAA California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment) and tables on pacFIN ports and species used, formulated from https://pacfin.psmfc.org/pacfin_pub/codes.php, are provided in this repository submission. All code used in the analysis presented in this manuscript will be available on GitHub at https://github.com/koehnl/CommunityVuln_PlosOne at the time of publication.