Disturbance, Resources, and Climate Interactively Synchronize Kelp Forests Across Scales

Max Castorani, University of Virginia, Department of Environmental Sciences, Charlottesville, United States, Tom William Bell, University of California, Santa Barbara, Earth Research Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, United States, Jonathan A Walter, Center for Watershed Sciences, Department of Environmental Sciences, Davis, United States, Daniel C Reuman, University of Kansas, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Lawrence, United States and Lawrence W Sheppard, University of Kansas, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Lawrence, KS, United States
Abstract:

Spatial synchrony—correlated temporal fluctuations in abundance at different locations—is a ubiquitous feature of population dynamics, but many aspects of this phenomenon are not well understood. In particular, ecologists have had difficulty determining how the individual and combined effects of multiple environmental drivers interact to determine synchrony, and whether these effects vary across spatial and temporal scales. Using several new statistical techniques, we characterized spatial synchrony in populations of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, a widely-distributed marine foundation species, and related it to synchrony in oceanographic conditions across 35 years and >900 km of coastline in California, USA. We discovered that three ecological processes (wave disturbance, seawater nitrate, and oceanographic climate) combine and interact synergistically and antagonistically to produce population synchrony, but that these interactions differ between regions on short, medium, and long timescales. Therefore, accurately predicting spatial population synchrony relies crucially on knowing whether Moran effects magnify or counteract one another across both geography and timescales.

Back to: Ecology and Biogeochemistry of Macroalgae I