Warming winter temperatures are driving range expansion of tropical, cold‐sensitive mangroves into temperate ecosystems. Along the Atlantic coast of North America, the mangrove range limit is particularly sensitive to climate variability and historical data demonstrate that the mangrove‐salt marsh ecotone on this coast has shifted recurrently during recent centuries. However, a comprehensive understanding of how this mangrove‐...

A fundamental goal in ecology is to understand the drivers of stability in natural ecosystems in the face of disturbances. However, this is challenging when biotic and abiotic stressors operate simultaneously across multiple spatial scales. Such is the case for bull kelp forests ( Nereocystis luetkeana ) in northern California, where losses of predators combined with marine heatwaves have led to shifts from kelp forest to sea...

Aim We aim to review present uncertainties in projecting fine‐scale future precipitation in an area of high model disagreement, which is also data poor, topographically complex, and experiences climate‐driven threats to endemic biodiversity. Location Hawaiian Islands. Time Period We primarily focused on downscaling studies from the past decade and studies comparing the most recent iterations of the Coupled Model Intercompariso...

Biodiversity can stabilize ecological communities through biological insurance, but climate and other environmental changes may disrupt this process via simultaneous ecosystem destabilization and biodiversity loss. While changes to diversity–stability relationships (DSRs) and the underlying mechanisms have been extensively explored in terrestrial plant communities, this topic remains largely unexplored in benthic marine ecosys...

Climate change is altering species’ range limits and transforming ecosystems. For example, warming temperatures are leading to the range expansion of tropical, cold-sensitive species at the expense of their cold-tolerant counterparts. In some temperate and subtropical coastal wetlands, warming winters are enabling mangrove forest encroachment into salt marsh, which is a major regime shift that has significant ecological and so...

Southeast Asia is home to some of the planet’s most carbon-dense and biodiverse mangrove ecosystems. There is still much uncertainty with regards to the timing and magnitude of changes in mangrove cover over the past 50 years. While there are several regional to global maps of mangrove extent in Southeast Asia over the past two decades, data prior to the mid-1990s is limited due to the scarcity of Earth Observation (EO) data o...

Introduction The red sea urchin fishery is one of the most important fisheries in Baja California and the only urchin fishery in México; yet little is known on understanding how local, regional, and oceanic environmental variability may affect red sea urchin populations. Methods We analyzed how food availability, predator abundance and environmental variability could affect red sea urchin populations developing generalized lin...

Spatial synchrony is a ubiquitous and important feature of population dynamics, but many aspects of this phenomenon are not well understood. In particular, it is largely unknown how multiple environmental drivers interact to determine synchrony via Moran effects, and how these impacts vary across spatial and temporal scales. Using new wavelet statistical techniques, we characterised synchrony in populations of giant kelp Macro...

Spatial synchrony may be tail‐dependent, that is, stronger when populations are abundant than scarce, or vice‐versa. Here, ‘tail‐dependent’ follows from distributions having a lower tail consisting of relatively low values and an upper tail of relatively high values. We present a general theory of how the distribution and correlation structure of an environmental driver translates into tail‐dependent spatial synchrony through...

Surface-canopy forming kelps provide the foundation for ecosystems that are ecologically, culturally, and economically important. However, these kelp forests are naturally dynamic systems that are also threatened by a range of global and local pressures. As a result, there is a need for tools that enable managers to reliably track changes in their distribution, abundance, and health in a timely manner. Remote sensing data avai...

Aim Climate change is leading to large‐scale shifts in species’ range limits. Mangroves, for example, are encroaching into saltmarshes at numerous tropical–temperate transition zones. However, mangrove expansion varies geographically, in large part because mangroves might not be fully occupying their fundamental niches across their range limits. Here we characterize and compare the fundamental versus realized thermal niches of...

The emerging sector of offshore kelp aquaculture represents an opportunity to produce biofuel feedstock to help meet growing energy demand. Giant kelp represents an attractive aquaculture crop due to its rapid growth and production, however precision farming over large scales is required to make this crop economically viable. These demands necessitate high frequency monitoring to ensure outplant success, maximum production, an...

Sea level rise ( SLR ) threatens coastal wetlands worldwide, yet the fate of individual wetlands will vary based on local topography, wetland morphology, sediment dynamics, hydrologic processes, and plant‐mediated feedbacks. Local variability in these factors makes it difficult to predict SLR effects across wetlands or to develop a holistic regional perspective on SLR response for a diversity of wetland types. To improve regio...

Aim Correlative distribution models have been used to identify potential climatic controls of mangrove range limits, but there is still uncertainty about the relative importance of these factors across different regions. To provide insights into the strength of climatic control of different mangrove range limits, we tested whether temporal variability in mangrove abundance increases near range limits and whether this variabili...