Our group examines how climate change affectes fishes and the ecosystems in which they live, with the goal of addressing real-world challenges such as sustainble fisheries. We combine macroecological theory and quantitative approaches to answer applied questions and advance ecology.

How will species and ecosystems respond to environmental change?

While a range of biological responses to warming are predicted to occur, three are thought to be generally universal across species: shifting geographic distributions, changes in phenology, and changes in size and growth. Our work examines these responses in fishes across levels of biological organization and geographic scales and ims to forecast future change and what it means for marine ecosystems and the services they provide. For example, we’ve identified whether environmental conditions affect spatial and temporal patterns of growth and size across commercially important fish species (Bigman et al. in review) and mapped past and future changes in spawning habitat with temperature for Pacific cod (Bigman et al. 2023).

Work with collaborators has examined changes in larval size-at-date with temperature in high-latitude systems, how population growth rate varies with oxygen across fishes, how population growth rate varies temperature, depth, and body mass across rays and skates (Barrowclift et al. 2023), and how length-at-maturity varies with maximum length across fishes (Chen et al. 2021).

Once we know how and why species are changing, we can evaluate impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide, including fisheries. We integrate quantitative modeling with oceanographic data and models to forecast biological change and its consequences for marine systems and fisheries.

What are the fundamental processes that underlie biological change?

To predict how future change will affect the ecology of fishes, we must understand the proceses that govern species’ responses. Our work in this area investigates why fishes respond to environmental change and whether ecological theory can help us identify the underlying forces driving such change.

Work in this area has examined whether the demography and extinction risk of populations is affected by the interplay of temperature, ecology, and physiology (Barrowclift et al. in review; Wong et al. 2021 a; Wong et al. 2021 b; Gravel et al. 2024), quantified how oxygen uptake varies with temperature and size across fishes and other vertebrates (Bigman et al. 2021), explored whether oxygen is important in explaining patterns of growth across fishes (Bigman et al. 2023 a; Bigman et al. 2023 b; Prinzing et al. 2023), and has evaluated proxies of metabolic demand for linking to temperature and environmental conditions (Bigman et al. 2018; Vanderwright et al. 2020).

Best practices in quantitative modeling

Working across scales, fields, and data types raises computational challenges. We develop novel quantitative approches and identify best practices in quantitative ecology. For example, we explored the consequence of model selection for understanding the effects of temperature and oxygen on size and growth (Bigman et al. in review) and developed novel Bayesian statistical frameworks to propagate uncertainty in relationships within species when examined across species (Bigman et al. 2021; Bigman et al. 2023 a; Bigman et al. 2023 b. Additionally, our work includes understanding how the complex nature of spatiotemporal models affects our understanding of species’ responses to climate change (Bigman et al. in review). We are active in the open science movement and write papers that call for data standardization and best practices when using big data (e.g., Audzijonyte et al. 2025).