The Advisory Panel on Anthropogenic Influences on Coastal Ecosystems (AICE) is focused primarily on human influences on coastal (near-shore to continental shelf) ecosystems, such as runoff, pollution, effects of fishing, existence of non-indigenous species, and loss of habitat. Even though AICE will keep all FUTURE key questions in mind while pursuing its activities, the purview of AICE is mainly the key questions (3) How do human activities affect coastal ecosystems and how are societies affected by changes in these ecosystems? and (1) What determines an ecosystem’s intrinsic resilience and vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic forcing?

AICE will be associated initially with the following expert groups:

The expert groups associated with AICE should consider issues such as:

1. Integrated understanding of past coastal ecosystem change caused by anthropogenic forcing, especially hypoxia, eutrophication, chemical pollution, and fishing-related shifts in community or size structure and how societies have been affected by these changes;
   
2. Comparing the responses of sensitive organisms to specific anthropogenic perturbations and internal community shifts using retrospective data analysis, ecosystem models, field studies, and laboratory and manipulation experiments;
   
3. Understanding how continued eutrophication, pollution, fishing, and other anthropogenic pressures change future coastal marine ecosystems and how these affect societies; and evaluating how societies can sustain their resilience to inevitable ecosystem changes, and which societal choices lessen the stresses placed on ecosystems.

1. Understanding how natural and human perturbations cascade through ecosystems;
   
2. The relevance of key species concepts in North Pacific marine ecosystems and their sensitivity to perturbation;
   
3. Identifying amplifiers and buffers of perturbation effects in marine food webs and what scales and magnitudes of perturbations may induce irreversible ecosystem change;
   
4. Understanding the mechanisms of recruitment variation in populations of commercially valuable organisms such as finfish, shellfish, shrimp, squid, kelp, etc.