1,720,967 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Marine Mass Mortality in a Global Change Context: Impacts on Individuals, Populations and Communities
Full text linkHuman actions are pushing natural systems into states that have no historical precedent. In response, empirical and theoretical researchers are increasingly focused on developing ways to predict the responses of ecological systems to change. However, significant knowledge gaps remain, often leading to “ecological surprises” where observed impacts of global change do not align with existing theory or hypotheses. In this dissertation, I study the response to perturbations of a well-characterized system for ecological research, the Northeast Pacific rocky intertidal, to advance our understanding of and ability to predict the impacts of global change on individuals, populations and communities.
In 2013 and 2014, sea star species along the west coast of North America were affected by an outbreak of Sea Star Wasting Syndrome (SSWS), resulting in an epidemic of mass mortality that spanned unprecedented geographic and temporal scales and resulted in the near extirpation of multiple sea star species from many locations along the coast. One of the species that was most strongly affected in the intertidal zone was Pisaster ochraceus, an iconic predatory sea star that has the ability to play a keystone role in its community through foraging on and ultimately controlling the lower boundary of mussel prey populations. The first two chapters of this dissertation take advantage of SSWS as a “natural” form of top predator removal to assess the consequences of this type of perturbation on ecosystem resilience.
In Chapter 2, I tested the hypotheses that P. ochraceus loss would facilitate a population expansion of a smaller, mesopredator sea star, Leptasterias sp., and that this expansion would have negative effects on P. ochraceus population recovery. This result would follow expectations of competitive release and aligns with existing research on the competitive relationship between these species from the Northeast Pacific intertidal. I used field surveys to track Leptasterias populations just before the onset of and up to three years after SSWS. Contrary to expectation, I did not see an increase in the distribution or density of Leptasterias, and instead saw a decrease in individual size post-SSWS. Further, I found no evidence of competition between P. ochraceus recruits and Leptasterias for resources. Thus, although my hypotheses were grounded in theory and previous research, they were not supported by data. These results suggest that Leptasterias will not provide a bottleneck for P. ochraceus population recovery from SSWS, nor compensate for lowered P. ochraceus predation.
The dynamics of P. ochraceus at the recruit (early benthic juvenile) life-history stage has long been considered a gap in our understanding of the species, as recruits have been historically rare in the intertidal and hard to study. Post-SSWS, however, many sites along the coast experienced unprecedented recruitment of P. ochraceus into intertidal ecosystems. In Chapter 3, I used a field experiment to test the hypothesis that this pulse of recruitment was facilitated by SSWS-related adult loss, the consequent decrease in predation by adult P. ochraceus, and increase in prey availability for recruits. Instead of finding evidence that adults dominate recruits in food competition and inhibit recruit success, I found that recruits have a negative effect on P. ochraceus adult densities. Further, treatments where recruits were excluded and only adults had access to prey communities showed the highest control of sessile invertebrate prey populations at the end of the year-long experiment. Thus, these results suggest that adult P. ochraceus will not hinder recruit recovery, but propose a mechanism whereby high recruit densities may increase vulnerability to SSWS-induced shifts in community structure.
Outbreaks of mass mortality, particularly those as widespread as SSWS, are one of many ecological challenges driven by anthropogenic environmental changes such as warming and ocean acidification. However, predicting the vulnerability of species and populations to global change is an ongoing and significant challenge for researchers and managers. In Chapter 4 I assessed whether intraspecific physiological variability could help predict P. ochraceus recruit response to ocean acidification and warming. I found that individual metabolic rate interacted with ocean acidification and food availability to drive sea star growth, and that an interaction between metabolic rate and temperature also predicted sea star predation on Mytilus spp. mussels. Thus, these results have implications not only for P. ochraceus but also for its food web interactions. Incorporating these results into predictive frameworks may improve our ability to anticipate and scale up responses to global change across levels of ecological organization.
In summary, my dissertation, although chock-full of surprises, presents several paths forward for improving predictive ability in the face of accelerating anthropogenic global changes. Further, we reinforce the notion that management strategies should be cautious and anticipate ecological surprises. Predicting the future is challenging even when predictions are well-informed, particularly in environmental contexts that have never been encountered before
Recommended from our members
Using The MPA Guide to Better Understand Global Marine Conservation Efforts
Full text linkAcross the globe, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been established to protect biodiversity, sustain fisheries, and preserve cultural resources. However, there exist broad differences among MPAs with respect to their establishment stage and protective regulations, making it difficult to quantify how much ocean protection is actually occurring. This thesis utilizes the novel scoring system found in the soon-to-be-published MPA Guide to assess the world’s 25 largest MPAs, highlighting Stage of Establishment and Level of Protection to predict their conservation benefits. It was found that 27% of the assessed MPAs’ Stage of Establishment was Designated, with no active regulations on-the-water, while 47% were Implemented and 26% were Actively Managed. Current literature indicates that the magnitude of biodiversity outcomes expected of an MPA zone is directly related to its Level of Protection, and 24% of assessed MPA zones were Fully Protected, 24% Highly Protected, 10% Lightly Protected, 5% Minimally Protected, and 10% Incompatible with the Conservation of Nature. The remaining 27% of assessed zones were “Unknown,” as these were the MPAs with a “Designated” Stage of Establishment and rules and regulations are not yet final. The results emphasize the calls made by many ocean conservation experts to achieve the greatest conservation outcomes possible by implementing MPAs with Full to High Protection throughout the ocean
Recommended from our members
Community, Conflict, and Enabling Conditions: A Qualitative Analysis of Oregon's Marine Reserve System to Inform Adaptive Management
No full textAnthropogenic impacts affecting marine biodiversity are increasing, threatening beneficial ecological services such as carbon sequestration, fisheries productivity, and more (Ali et al., 2024). Continuous concentrated conservation efforts, such as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), over a long timescale are needed to slow the rate at which biodiversity is lost (Worm et al., 2006). My research focuses on understanding how The MPA Guide Enabling Conditions for MPA effectiveness apply in the context of Oregon’s marine reserves, with a particular focus on the conflict management framework proposed by John Paul Lederach in 2003. I conducted qualitative analysis to account for a subset of the Enabling Conditions most relevant to conflict management of the ODFW Marine Synthesis Report 2009 - 2021 and the 2022 Assessment of Oregon’s Marine Reserves report. I found evidence for both conflict resolution and transformation within Lederach’s framework supporting several Conditions. Therefore, adaptive management must prioritize conflict resolution as well as conflict transformation, as the former underpins the latter.Keywords: Marine Protected Areas, Marine Reserves, Oregon, The MPA Guide, Enabling Conditions, conflict management, conflict resolution, conflict transformatio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
