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Team profile by Dana Grieco
Evidence synthesis is the process of compiling and analyzing as much relevant research on a given research topic as possible. Evidence synthesis products range from quantitative systematic reviews and meta-analyses to qualitative conceptual models and narrative reviews.
A majority of tropical climate research focuses on the impacts of climate on tropical habitats and downstream effects of habitat degradation on fish, ecosystems and dependent human communities. However, direct impacts of climate change on tropical fish are often overlooked. Thus, our research focuses on how climate change directly impacts reef fish and leads to downstream impacts on tropical social-ecological systems (fish populations, ecological communities, ecosystems and dependent human communities).
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To do this, all team members first went through an extensive evidence synthesis training course. After training, we used evidence synthesis to conduct an exploratory analysis using qualitative document coding to extract data.
We use a conceptual model to focus our analysis and highlight the pathways through which climate change affects tropical fish and fisheries (see showcase poster below). This holistic conceptual model will be key for understanding the wide range of impacts climate change will have on tropical social-ecological systems and will be part of a team publication within the next year.
This team was not finished there! We also dove into these questions on the small Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean, asking: How does climate change impact highly relevant reef fish in Sint Eustatius, and what are the downstream impacts on social-ecological systems?
To do this, we created a comprehensive search string and searched five literature databases. We then title-and-abstract screened all papers in the Colandr screening tool for review. Each paper is reviewed by at least two individuals for inclusion at the title-abstract level. We hope to do more work with these papers soon and push this work towards publication within the next year as well.
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As a bi-campus team, we meet weekly on Zoom. Thus, our team really enjoyed meeting in-person at the Duke Marine Lab during our start-of-year retreat and closing out our year together at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase!
Impact Cascades of Climate Change on Coral Reef Fishery Systems
Poster by Austin Burlile, Bridget Mills, Allison Aplin, William Trowbridge, Dana Grieco and David Gill
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