The North Pacific Ocean is experiencing unprecedented climate-driven changes and human-induced environmental degradation, negatively impacting marine ecosystems and fisheries across national boundaries. Although some monitoring programs are in place, they often remain fragmented in space and time, hindering basin-scale assessments and effective regional management.
As a flagship assessment project of PICES, the North Pacific Ecosystem Status Reports (NPESR) were initiated in the early 2000s to provide an integrated overview of the status and trends of marine ecosystems, including the climate, oceanography, biology, and human dimensions. These reports provided member nations and their stakeholders with the large-scale understanding to improve fisheries and ecosystem management decisions by being open and transparent. A synthesis of variables across regions was included as a separate Chapter (NPESR-1 and 2) or stand-alone publication (NPESR-3), representing an important collaborative effort to synthesize basin-scale ecosystem variability.
Past publications (NPESR-1, NPESR-2, and NPESR-3), revealed detailed changes across 14 distinct ecoregions, highlighting their unique ecological characteristics and responses to climate and human-induced pressures. However, despite this comprehensive geographic coverage, or cross-regional comparisons were limited due to varying data availability and analytical approaches across ecoregions. Although NPESR-3 attempted to promote standardized data contributions through an online data submission system, the protocol requiring additional effort from contributors was not widely adopted. Given the challenges of the coordination framework for NPESR, in addition to the lengthy process to obtain relevant data for each region, it remains unclear how effectively the NPESR has been used for supporting ecosystem-based management among member countries and other stakeholders.
In 2024, the PICES External Review Recommendation Report encouraged the transformation of PICES to deliver “Actionable Science” in a more explicit manner. The report emphasized the need for the next NPESR to evolve to provide meaningful information to the users across PICES communities and beyond. We propose this SG to develop an implementation plan for the next NPESR, grounded in a more coordinated and efficient framework to enhance comparability across regions, improve detection of ecosystem-wide patterns, and integrate findings into management decisions in a timely manner.