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Scope & themes

IMHWS-1 covers marine heatwaves in the widest sense: how we define and detect them, what drives them, whether we can predict them, what they do to marine life, what that costs people, and what anyone can do about it. Surface or subsurface, open ocean to estuary, days to seasons — and we are equally interested in marine cold spells and in compound events. If your work concerns marine heatwaves it is in scope, and if you are unsure whether yours does, it almost certainly is.

There is no separate call for sessions

Most conferences ask you to propose a session, then ask everyone else to submit into the sessions that got accepted. That decides the shape of the meeting before anyone knows what the community actually wants to present. We are doing it the other way round. Submit the abstract you want to give. Once submissions close we will group them into sessions, and the programme will reflect what was sent rather than what we guessed a year earlier.

The kinds of work this covers

These are not sessions and you do not need to pick one. They are here so you can see the breadth of what belongs at this meeting, and to make the point that a marine heatwave symposium is not only a physical oceanography meeting.

Definition, detection & data

The unglamorous questions underneath everything else, several of which the field still disagrees about.

  • Baselines: fixed, shifting or detrended, and what a climatology means in an ocean that is warming underneath it

  • Whether intensity categories actually map onto ecological consequence

  • Subsurface events, and detecting them with sparse observations

  • Compound events: heat with deoxygenation, acidification, freshwater or light stress

  • Disagreement between satellite, in situ and reanalysis products

  • Marine cold spells, as the informative counterpoint

Physical drivers & mechanisms

Why a particular event happened, where the heat came from, and what ended it.

  • Partitioning air–sea flux, advection and mixing

  • Boundary currents, eddies and the role of ocean dynamics

  • Teleconnections with ENSO, the IOD, SAM and atmospheric blocking

  • Stratification, mixed-layer depth and event persistence

  • Vertical structure and the relationship between surface and depth

  • Termination: why some events collapse abruptly and others decay

Prediction, projection & attribution

Forecasting that gets tested, and projections that are honest about what they can and cannot resolve.

  • Subseasonal to seasonal forecast skill, and where predictability runs out

  • Early warning systems that someone actually uses to make a decision

  • Model projections, emergence times and the limits of coarse resolution

  • Downscaling for shelf seas and coastal systems

  • Attribution of individual events

  • Forecasts that failed, and a diagnosis of why

Biological & ecological responses

What heat does to organisms, populations and ecosystems, measured rather than assumed.

  • Thermal physiology, tolerance limits and sublethal effects

  • Mass mortality: kelp, coral, seagrass, invertebrates, seabirds, mammals

  • Range shifts, tropicalisation and community reorganisation

  • Recovery, resistance, hysteresis and regime shifts

  • Cumulative and sequential events, and the ecology of no recovery time

  • Acclimation, adaptive capacity and evolutionary responses

  • Food-web and trophic consequences

People, economies & societies

The half of this problem that physical and ecological work alone cannot reach.

  • Fisheries and aquaculture losses, closures and quota consequences

  • Food security and small-scale fisheries livelihoods

  • Indigenous and local knowledge, and sea country relationships

  • Public perception, media framing and why a marine heatwave is harder to see than a terrestrial one

  • Insurance, markets and supply chains

  • Governance, law and who carries the cost

Management, mitigation & adaptation

What can actually be done, and evidence about whether it worked.

  • Turning a forecast into a decision someone is willing to make

  • Dynamic ocean management and real-time response

  • Protected area design when thermal regimes move

  • Restoration, refugia and assisted adaptation

  • Decision-making under deep uncertainty

  • Interventions that have been implemented, and how they performed

Particularly welcome

Genuinely interdisciplinary work

Studies that connect physical drivers to biological outcomes to human consequences, rather than stopping at the boundary of one discipline and speculating about the next. This is the hardest kind of work to publish and the easiest kind to present.

Societal impacts, management and adaptation

Consequences for fisheries, aquaculture, tourism and coastal communities, and what was actually done about them: management responses, industry adaptation, mitigation, and honest accounts of what worked and what did not.

Long records and historical events

Palaeo and historical reconstructions, long monitoring series, and re-analysis of events that predate the satellite era or the term itself.

Negative and null results

Events that caused less damage than expected, systems that proved more resilient than predicted, methods that did not work. These are as informative as the headline mortality events and far less often presented.

A few kinds of contribution that conferences systematically under-represent, and that we would like to see more of at this one.

Interactions and compound events

Heat rarely arrives alone. Work on marine heatwaves together with acidification, deoxygenation, freshwater input, storms or disease, and on the cases where the combination does something none of the stressors does by itself.

Under-observed regions and phenomena

Much of the tropical Atlantic, the Indian Ocean rim, South East Asia, South America and the polar oceans are thinly represented in this literature, as are subsurface and benthic events anywhere. If you work there, your first characterisation is new work.

Methods, data and tools

Observing systems, detection software, open datasets, reproducible workflows. Infrastructure work is easy to overlook and much of the field depends on it.

Meeting in person

IMHWS-1 is an in-person meeting. There is no virtual or hybrid attendance option.

We discussed the alternatives at length and chose to meet face to face. Bringing together researchers from different disciplines and opposite sides of the world needs people in a room: talking, socialising, getting to know one another. Existing partnerships survive on video calls; new ones rarely start on them.

Getting here is not a small thing, and neither is the emissions cost of a room full of people who have flown a long way. We will keep the meeting itself as carbon-light as we can, but the flights are the bulk of it.

So make the journey do more than one job. Stay either side of the meeting. Take the fieldwork trip you have been putting off. Spend time with the researchers you normally only see on a screen. Turn it into an odyssey: Western Australia is spectacular and has produced some of the most consequential marine heatwaves on record (see Perth & things to do), and the rest of the continent repays the detour. Most routes here break somewhere useful, so stop over in Asia or the Gulf and meet the collaborators you have only ever emailed.

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