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Global Analysis of Shallow Underwater Fish Observation Research: 70 Years of Progress, Persistent Geographic Biases and a Path ForwardNARA Subscribed
Marine ecosystems are increasingly threatened by overfishing, pollution, coastal development and climate change, underscoring the need for long‐term, representative information on key fish populations and habitats to inform management and policy. Underwater fish observation (UFObs) techniques, such as Underwater Visual Census (UVC), stereo‐Baited Remote Underwater Video (stereo‐BRUV) and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), play...
From kelp forests to turf reefs: Patterns, drivers, and impacts to functional diversityNARA Subscribed
Kelp forests are declining in many regions due to ocean warming, predator loss, and other anthropogenic stressors. In areas of rapid ocean warming, including the southern Gulf of Maine, these ecosystems have transitioned to a novel state dominated by low‐lying mats of turf algae. However, the pace, drivers, and ecological consequences of this transition remain unclear. Here, we used field surveys from 32 sites over 5 years (20...
Biotic Mechanisms Strengthen Functional and Phylogenetic Convergence of Reef Fish Assemblages at Higher LatitudesNARA Subscribed
Aim How communities of organisms come together has long fascinated scientists, with renewed interest in using functional and evolutionary patterns to infer mechanisms of community assembly. Ecological theory predicts that biotic interactions could lead to either divergence in the event of niche partitioning or convergence through the exclusion of competitively inferior species, but most macroecological studies attribute the la...
Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) has spread throughout Florida’s Coral Reef, causing extensive mortality of over 30 species of reef-building corals, and has rapidly spread to many other countries and territories throughout the Caribbean. Current treatments for SCTLD, including a proprietary paste mixed with the antibiotic amoxicillin, do not provide protection from future infections and may select for antibiotic-resista...
Motivation Here, we make available a second version of the BioTIME database, which compiles records of abundance estimates for species in sample events of ecological assemblages through time. The updated version expands version 1.0 of the database by doubling the number of studies and includes substantial additional curation to the taxonomic accuracy of the records, as well as the metadata. Moreover, we now provide an R packag...
A Latitudinal Cline in the Taxonomic Structure of Eelgrass Epifaunal Communities is Associated With Plant Genetic DiversityNARA Subscribed
Aim Biogenic structural complexity increases mobile animal richness and abundance at local, regional and global scales, yet animal taxa vary in their response to complexity. When these taxa also vary functionally, habitat structures favouring certain taxa may have consequences for ecosystem function. We characterised global patterns of epifaunal invertebrates in eelgrass ( Zostera marina ) beds that varied in structural and ge...
Interplay of management and environmental drivers shifts size structure of reef fish communitiesNARA Subscribed
Countries are expanding marine protected area (MPA) networks to mitigate fisheries declines and support marine biodiversity. However, MPA impact evaluations typically assess total fish biomass. Here, we examine how fish biomass disaggregated by adult and juvenile life stages responds to environmental drivers, including sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies and human footprint, and multiple management types at 139 reef sites...
Media myopia distorts public interest in US invasive plantsNARA Subscribed
Introduced invasive plants are a major environmental problem, but public interest in invasive plants is generally considered low compared to climate change and threatened flagship species, hindering support for effective management and policy. To understand what does drive public interest in invasive plants in the US, we investigated Google Trends search data from 2010 to 2020 for 209 introduced plant species found in the cont...
Foundational biodiversity effects propagate through coastal food webs via multiple pathwaysNARA Subscribed
Relatively few studies have attempted to resolve the pathways through which the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning cascade from one trophic level to another. Here, we manipulated the richness of habitat‐forming seaweeds in a western Atlantic estuary to explore how changes in foundation species diversity affect the structure and functioning of the benthic consumer communities that they support. Structural equation...
Long-term Annual Aerial Surveys of Submersed Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) Support Science, Management, and RestorationNARA Subscribed
Aerial surveys of coastal habitats can uniquely inform the science and management of shallow, coastal zones, and when repeated annually, they reveal changes that are otherwise difficult to assess from ground-based surveys. This paper reviews the utility of a long-term (1984–present) annual aerial monitoring program for submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) in Chesapeake Bay, its tidal tributaries, and nearby Atlantic coastal bays...
Herbivores, omnivores, and predators transfer energy and structure the communities of many coastal marine ecosystems, and the intensity with which they consume prey and contribute to ecosystem functioning varies substantially among habitats over short time periods. Whether generalities across habitats might emerge for longer time series and using standard methods remains largely untested. Here, we deployed standardized assays...
Acquiring marine biodiversity data is difficult, costly, and time-consuming, making it challenging to understand the distribution and abundance of life in the ocean. Historically, approaches to biodiversity sampling over large geographic scales have advocated for equivalent effort across multiple sites to minimize comparative bias. When effort cannot be equalized, techniques such as rarefaction have been applied to minimize bi...
Coastal wetlands are significant sources of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to adjacent waters and, consequently, exert a strong influence on the quantity and quality of DOC exported to the coastal oceans. Our understanding of the factors that control the exchange of DOC at the tidal marsh‐estuarine interface, however, remains limited. We hypothesize that tidal marsh soils act as a regulator and that their physical characterist...
Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community‐led open‐source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal...