Oregon State Study Shows Coastal Ecosystem Is Destabilizing Due to Climate Change – Are You Okay?
OREGON State University
CORVALLIS, Ore – Ecological communities on the Oregon coast are being subtly destabilized by the pressures of climate change despite emerging resistance to stress, new Oregon State University research suggests. see.
The finding is important because assessing and understanding how plants, animals and other life forms respond to a warming planet is critical to human welfare, said lead author Bruce Menge. people.
Research published today on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that ecological communities in Oregon’s rocky intertidal zone have grown less stable for at least a decade, even though their structures – the organisms that comprise them – have remained essentially the same.
Community destabilization arises from a decrease in resilience – the ability to recover from disturbance. The findings suggest that other ecological communities around the globe that predict a truly stable appearance will not appear that way when closely examining how their member organisms collectively respond in the face of adversity. interruption.
“Climate change is threatening to destabilize ecological communities,” said Menge, a professor of integrative biology at OSU, who has conducted research on the coast for four decades. “One possibility is that they will stop being continuously occupied, what we call a catch basin, and move into other states.”
Menge, postdoctoral researcher Sarah Gravem and colleagues at the College of Science looked at a total of six sites in three separate regions of Oregon’s low tide between 2011 and 2019. The regions are Cape Perpetua on the Central Coast, Cape Foulweather to the north and Cape Blanco to the south.
At each site, the scientists created five “shuffling cells,” each half a square meter wide. Once a year, those patches of land are cleared of all life forms large enough to be seen with the naked eye: limbs, clams, anemones, seahorses, seagrasses, sponges, snails, crabs, stars. sea, etc.
The plots are photographed regularly, and from those pictures, the researchers can assess the number of taxa per plot.
If the ecological communities around the plots are stable, the plots will show patterns of stable recovery after each luminescence. That’s not what happened, the researchers found.
In general, the disturbances have caused communities to move toward structures dominated by open space and “weed” taxa such as thorns and filamentous algae.
“And in all cases, over time, the rate of recovery slows down and also becomes more variable,” says Gravem. “Increasing variability in key ecological processes could signal that an ecosystem is on the verge of transition. On the Oregon coast, the factors behind that increasing variability seem to come from changes in ocean currents and thermal disruptions such as marine heatwaves, which can alter development, reduce colonize and kill the creatures”.
The study doesn’t necessarily indicate that the iconic rocky regions of the Oregon coast are nearing an ecological tipping point, where sudden, often irreversible ecosystem changes occur, the scientists say. happen. But the findings are not good news either, they said.
“On land, extreme wildfires illustrate how gradual changes in temperature or rainfall can lead to catastrophic events,” says Menge. “In the ocean environment, new events such as marine heatwaves and disease outbreaks are new and acute threats in addition to the gradual increase in water temperature and ocean acidification commonly associated with climate change. ”
Scientists say that while it is difficult to predict exactly when a sudden ecosystem change will occur, systems near the brink of a change can send warning signals. The growing change in community structure is thought to be one of them, and another is that the system recovers more and more slowly from minor disturbances.
“Resilient systems can quickly return to their original configuration after being perturbed,” says Gravem. “Rocky intertidal systems are highly dynamic, but Oregon has begun to show signs of loss of resilience, possibly in response to the unprecedented stresses associated with acute warming events.” . Even the intact communities we studied next to cleared land became more variable, which we believe is a sign of instability and a warning sign. early for a change in the status of the community. ”
The National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Kingfisher Foundation, and the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation supported this research.
Angela Johnson, Jonathan Robinson and Brittany Poirson of the OSU College of Science were also involved in the study.
JOURNEYS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
RESEARCH METHODS
Experimental study
RESEARCH SUBJECTS
Animal
ARTICLE TITLE
Increased instability of a Mid-Rocky superecosystem
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
January 10, 2022
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