Climate change drives shifts in straddling fish stocks in the world’s ocean

This repository supports the publication Climate change drives shifts in straddling fish stocks in the world’s ocean published in 2025

Authors: Juliano Palacios-Abrantes*¹, Bianca S. Santos², Thomas L. Frölicher^3,4, Gabriel Reygondeau⁵, U. Rashid Sumaila^1,6, Colette C. C. Wabnitz^1,7 & William W. L. Cheung¹

1- Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Canada.

2- Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Stanford University, United States.

3- Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland.

4- Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Switzerland.

5- Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, University of Miami, United States.

6- School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, The University of British Columbia, Canada.

7- Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University, United States.

*Corresponding author: Juliano Palacios-Abrantes, j.palacios[at]oceans.ubc.ca

Palacios-Abrantes, J., Santos B.S., Frölicher, T.L., Reygondeau, G., Sumaila, U.R., Wabnitz, C.C.C., and Cheung, W.W.L. 2025. Climate change drives shifts in straddling fish stocks in the world’s ocean. Science Advances. 11,eadq5976(2025)

Project Goal:

Identify straddles between the high seas and EEZs and investigate the effects of climate-induced distribution shifts on the sharing of straddling stocks.

i) which stocks straddle between the high seas and global EEZs

ii) weather climate change will affect the proportion of the distribution between EEZs and the high-seas.

Files and folders organization:

In this repository you will find all of the code related to the manuscript. Note that the code needs to compile data from external sources. Due to the large volume of data, these are not in GitHub. See Data Availability below.

Repository structure

straddling_cc/                    
├── functions/                    # Custom R functions used throughout the project
│   ├── circle_figures_fx         # Function to create all circle figures
│   ├── get_results.R        
│   ├── get_spp_dist.R            
|   ├── rfmo_taxon_proportion.R
|   ├── stradd_index.R
│   └── taxon_proportion.R        
├── results/                      # Output directory for processed data, figures, and tables
│   ├── figures/                  # Figures and plots generated from analyses  
│   ├── supplements/              # Figures and plots generated for supplements      
│   └── tables/                   # Tables summarizing results
├── scripts/                      # R scripts for executing analyses
│   ├── main_analysis.Rmd         # Rmarkdown file containing all the analysis
├── .gitignore                    # Specifies which files/folders Git should ignore
├── LICENSE                       # License file (e.g., MIT, CC BY-NC 4.0)
├── MigrantFish.Rproj            # RStudio project file
└── README.md                    # Project overview and instructions

Data Availability

The raw data used in this analysis comes from different sources including OBIS, GBIF, The Sea Around Us, and FishBase, among others. These can be sourced directly from their respectively webpages and/or the references provided on the text. The data containing the identification of transboundary species per eez and fishing nation and the catch trend of each taxon per eez can be found here. Please feel free to email me to discuss anything related to data sharing or code reproducibility.

Primary data

All primary data generated by this project can be found at the UBC Dataverse Borealis Portal. Metadata is also included there.

Reference: Palacios Abrantes, Juliano; Santos, Bianca S.; Frölicher, Thomas L.; Reygondeau, Gabriel; Sumaila, U. Rashid; Wabnitz, Colette C. C.; Cheung, William W.L., 2025, "Data for Climate change drives shifts in straddling fish stocks in the world’s ocean", Borealis, V2

Support data

Support data used in this project is called along the methods section of the main_analysis.Rmd script. Note that these data were used in building the final result and most of them (i.e., relevant) are included in the primary data. These are used in the results section.

Species related data

• Transboundary_spp.csv, This is the list of transboundary species identified by Palacios-Abrantes et al., 2020 and can be retrieved from the project's github FishForVisa
• Clean_Results_Trans.csv, This is the analysis for transboundary species done by Palacios-Abrantes et al., 2020 and can be retrieved from the project's github FishForVisa
• exploited_species_list.csv, This list references the taxon_key with the taxon_sci_name. Can be extracted from the primary data.

Spatial data

• MEOW, The shapefile for the Marine Ecoregions of the World: A Bioregionalization of Coastal and Shelf Areas can be dowloaded from the WWF website
• SAUEEZ_July2015.shp, This is the Sea Around Us (SAU) shapefile for the world EEZs. Contact the SAU for a version of it.
• RFMO.shp, This is the Sea Around Us (SAU) shapefile for the world RFMOs. Contact the SAU for a version of it.
• ALL_META_HAB_CMIP6_LAYERS.csv, This is data represents the high seas basin data from Reygondeau et al., 2018.
• ob_meow_neighbours.csv, data related to what ocean basins are neighbouring the global MEOWs.
• meow_dbem_grid.csv, grided MEOWs sh to 0.5 x 0.5 matching DBEM.
• dbem_coords.csv, 0.5 x 0.5 gridded DBEM.
• RFMO_Index_Code.csv, RFMO shapefile gridded to the DBEM
• eez_rfmo_region.csv, data related to what EEZs are neighbouring RFMOs.
• RFMO_Neighbours_List.csv, data related to what RFMO are neighbouring other RFMOs.

As of August of 2025 the paper has been published and this repository has been archived