Dr Jarrett Byrnes1, Andrea Brown2, Julien Beaulieu3, Amelia Hesketh4, Nicole Knight2, Jake Lawlor2, Jenny Muñoz4, Alexia Pereira5, Tianna Peller2,6,7, Kate Sheridan2, Laura Super8, Dr. Ellen Bledsoe9,10,11, Dr. Joseph Burant2,4,9, Dr. Jennifer Dijkstra12, Dr. Kylla Benes13
1Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, USA, 2McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 3Département de Sciences Biologiques, Université de Québec á Montréal, Montréal, Canada, 4 Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 5Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada, 6Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, 7Department of Aquatic Ecology, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland, 8 Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 9Living Data Project, Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 10 Department of Biology, University of Regina, Regina, Canada, 11School of Natural Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, 12Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA, 13Davidson Honors College, University of Montana, Missoula, USA
Global change biology is plagued by a lack of decadal datasets evaluating the responses of communities to both global and local drivers. Of those that do exist, most focus on a single habitat type rather than ecologically linked adjacent habitats. Yet these data are crucial for downscaling our predictions of the future of life in our oceans. Here we introduce multiple datasets spanning four decades from the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, Maine, and use them to examine the consequences of human drivers and their modification by local environmental variability and cross-habitat interactions. Broadly, we show that shifts in climate, fish communities, and invasions jointly translate to changes in the intertidal – but changes that are modified by small-scale abiotic variation. We begin with observations with NOAA trawl data showing multiple regime shifts in the subtidal from warming and fishing pressure. These shifts in subtidal communities correspond to changes in nearshore subtidal biogenic habitats, seen in hand-drawn maps from the 1980s to the present. They are also tied to changes in coupled subtidal-intertidal food webs (~25% of feeding links cross habitats). We then use permanent intertidal transect data from 1983 to the present and modeled temperatures to show climate impacts work in concert with changes in subtidal food webs to alter abundances of key species in intertidal food webs. Further, thermal affinity is related to changes in abundances of all species over forty years. However, all trends are modified by local scale shoreline orientation and oceanography. Overall, our work shows that long-term, spatially explicit datasets can yield a wealth of insights into how global change will manifest at local scales on temperate coastlines, but these insights require considering the intricately coupled nature of subtidal and intertidal habitats.
Presentation Slides – Jarrett Byrnes
Biography:
Jarrett Byrnes is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston where he studies Marine Ecology, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function, Climate Change Ecology, and kelp forests. He is also an affiliate faculty in the UMB School for the Environment.
