UConn Marine Sciences Associate Professor Samantha Siedlecki co-leads a project to incorporate data on historic and projected ocean conditions to predict the growth of scallops across vast geographic regions and more than a century of time. The project uses a novel tool developed by UConn Ph.D. candidate Halle Berger. Photo by NOAA.
In the coastal waters stretching from Maine to Virginia, Atlantic sea scallops rival lobster as the top shellfish caught in the wild. This delectable mollusk supports one of the most valuable fisheries in the U.S., generating $360 million in revenue annually, and making the U.S. a global leader in wild scallop fishing.
A combination of conservation measures has helped the industry weather the effects of overfishing. Now, warming and acidifying oceans are posing new threats and prompting new solutions.
A team of researchers co-led by UConn Associate Professor of Marine Sciences Samantha Siedlecki, Shannon Meseck, of NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and Robert “Bobby” Murphy, a social scientist with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, is exploring how environmental data can be used to develop a new management approach adapted for and responsive to a changing ocean. With the support of a three-year grant of just over $1 million from NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program (OAP), the project will integrate oceanographic modeling, industry engagement, and socioeconomic research to create actionable strategies for industry and management. The project is one of six announced by OAP in November aimed at helping U.S. coastal communities adapt to ocean acidification.
“This is one of the earliest attempts to forecast optimal regions for Atlantic sea scallop growth, based on both carbon content and ocean temperature,” says Siedlecki.
Ocean acidification occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) sent into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity is absorbed by the oceans. Like sponges, the oceans of the world soak up about one-third of the CO2 generated by humans. Once dissolved in seawater, the CO2 forms carbonic acid, which increases acidity and reduces the carbonate ions that shell-building sea life, like sea scallops, need to form shells and skeletons.
In other species of scallops, acidification and ocean warming have also been shown to affect reproduction, potentially reducing the number that reach harvestable size. Although no such experiments have been conducted on Atlantic sea scallops, researchers suspect that species is being impacted.
The scallop-fishing community is feeling the effects. Harvest areas are shifting, and stock density is declining. Scallops in the southern Mid-Atlantic in recent years haven’t grown to commercial size as quickly as expected.
Researchers have also gotten anecdotal reports of thinning shells breaking during dredging. To maintain productive harvests, scallop fishers have had to shift their efforts northward, which in turn drains revenue from their home ports and the local businesses where they buy groceries and fuel. Year-round scalloping is also becoming more difficult, pushing many in the scallop fishing community to consider other types of fishing.
The project builds on work done by the team during a first, four-year round of funding that included workshops in three major Atlantic sea scallop fishing ports – New Bedford, Massachusetts; Barnegat Light, New Jersey; and Newport News, Virginia.
Researchers are using the feedback gleaned from those workshops, and from interviews, to co-develop management techniques that promote sustainability under changing environmental conditions. Stakeholders include fishers, managers, and dealers, all of whom showed a high degree of engagement in the work researchers were doing in the first round of the project.
In the second round, which began in September, the team deployed a bioenergetic model developed by Halle Berger, a UConn Marine Sciences Ph.D. candidate working in Siedlecki’s lab, to forecast scallop growth. The model is built on a Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB), a special tool that incorporates physiological processes of individual organisms, such as feeding, respiration, growth, and reproduction into a single framework to predict optimal times and locations for sustainable scallop fishing.
DEB models for a specific species are not new. This model is novel because it’s the first to incorporate historic and future projected ocean conditions to fully map out spatially expected growth changes across a large geographic range and over the course of 120 years, Berger says. And unlike the “coarse” predictions generated by models on a global scale, Berger’s is downscaled to better capture coastal dynamics and biogeochemistry, which makes it more applicable to the marine environment of the Atlantic sea scallop.
“For us, this is a way to look at the trajectory; to look at long-term strategic planning so management will be more proactive,” says Berger, who serves on an advisory committee for the project and is lead author of a paper on the model published in the journal Ecological Modeling in December.
Baby scallops take about four years to reach harvesting size, and the model will help protect the beds in which they grow on the ocean floor. Using the growth-rate simulations produced by Berger’s model, resource managers will be able to determine when to close and reopen regions of the ocean with known scallop beds. While the prior funding allowed the research team to share the science behind the work with the scallop-fishing community, the second round will enable them to put it into action, Berger notes. By integrating real-time environmental data into fishery management, the project aims to improve long-term sustainability and economic stability for fishing communities.
The project is currently one of the top research efforts within NOAA and was highlighted on a list of 2025 accomplishments and milestones compiled by the agency’s research arm.
The expected outcomes of the project include seasonal forecasts to inform decision-making, strengthened collaboration and trust between scientists and the fishing community, and policy recommendations to mitigate impacts of extreme events on the fishing industry. The researchers also anticipate identifying key socioeconomic vulnerabilities to ocean acidification and pathways to improve the resiliency of the sea scallop industry. The findings will be directly communicated to the New England Fishery Management Council to inform decision-making.
“It’s challenging for people to understand how to use localized climate information,” says Siedlecki. “This project is a good example of how that information can be used, for marine resource management.”
Loretta Waldman, UConn Today, 16 March 2026. Article.
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