New paper in Global Change Biology about how humans affect oceans’ landscapes of fear

Our new paper out today in Global Change Biology, “Human activities change marine ecosystems by altering predation risk”, describes how human activity has led to major changes in predator numbers, and thus predation risk for predators’ prey, in the world’s oceans. We probe into the cascading effects through ecosystems of changes to predation risk for small animals. We find that the effects of predator populations changes can ripple through ocean ecosystems in a wide variety of (often surprising) ways by changing the landscape of fear for their prey. Understanding these effects will help us make informed predictions about when and where these effects will occur…and hopefully minimize them in the future.

Links:

The full paper and press release.