Dr. Dan Greenberg1,2, Dr Christy Pattengill-Semmens1, Dr. Brice Semmens2
1Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), Key Largo, USA, 2Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, La Jolla, USA
The abiotic environment is known to be a predominant driver of species’ population dynamics, but our understanding of how different species within an ecosystem fare during shared weather events remains surprisingly limited. From an evolutionary perspective, we expect that closely related species should display similar demographic responses to environmental forces (ie. phylogenetic niche conservatism), which in turn may manifest as the synchronization of population dynamics in these species. The degree to which closely related species’ population dynamics are synchronized, and whether this synchrony emerges from the abiotic environment, has important implications for how ecosystems may shift as global climate change unfolds. We analyzed over two decades of opportunistic citizen science data from roving divers to examine species’ population synchrony and its abiotic drivers for 41 species from 7 different fish clades in the Salish Sea of North America – a region that has experienced notable warming and a high frequency of extreme weather events in the recent past. We found that synchrony of annual fluctuations in sighting frequency varied considerably among clades – with some clades showing strong synchrony among species and others having highly divergent population dynamic. Including three measures of oceanic climate over time into our modeling framework suggested that this population synchrony emerges primarily from closely related species exhibiting shared responses to environmental drivers. This suggests that climate change may ultimately result in the loss of entire clades of species from a region – with potentially far-ranging consequences for broader interactions within these coastal ecosystems.
Presentation Slides – Christy Pattengill-Semmens
Biography:
Christy Pattengill-Semmens is a world leader in citizen science projects. She has been on staff with the non-profit marine conservation organization, Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), since 1998 and has served as an Executive Director of the organization since 2019. She oversees all aspects of REEF’s Volunteer Fish Survey Project, one of the longest-running and largest marine life sightings programs, engaging an army of volunteer divers and snorkelers. Her work intersects science, education, and conservation.
