The Nearshore Assessment Tool for Alaska: Southeast (NATAK-SE) is a standardized protocol for rapidly assessing the habitat and functions of a particular marine or estuarine shore segment (intertidal zone and immediately adjoining upland) anywhere in Southeast Alaska. It consists of data forms and a spreadsheet. It has a Rapid component...
The influence of loss of diversity on community dynamics and ecosystem functioning has recently received considerable attention. Although study of biodiversity has a long history within ecology, empirical investigations exploring consequences of loss have been rare. Because many factors confound diversity comparisons, experimental manipulations of diversity offer the most direct...
Most climate change predictions focus on the response of individual species to changing local conditions and ignore species interactions, largely due to the lack of a sound theoretical foundation for how interactions are expected to change with climate and how to incorporate them into climate change models. Much of the...
Understanding how large-scale processes (>100 kms) influence ecological communities is currently a major focus in ecology. In marine systems, coastal upwelling, a large-scale oceanographic process in which surface water pushed offshore by winds is replaced by cold, nutrient-rich water from depth, appears to cause variation in rocky intertidal communities. Along...
As ecologists are being called upon to predict the consequences of human
perturbations to natural communities, an important goal is to understand what factors
drive variability or consistency in nature.
In the rocky intertidal of San Juan Island, Washington, a comparative
experimental approach was used to investigate spatial and temporal...
I examined the biomechanical factors that influence the sizes of intertidal macroalgae by studying a population of Fucus gardneri at Fogarty Creek Point, OR. I constructed a mathematical model to predict optimal sizes and probabilities of survival for Fucus under conditions of high and low wave exposure. Predicted optimal sizes...
Oregon's rocky intertidal habitats have been subjected to gradually increasing human-use pressures as the coastal and tourist populations have risen over the years. Brosnan and Crumrine (1991,1992) have documented impacts to intertidal communities at Yaquina Head, Sunset Bay, and Haystack Rock that have resulted from people walking on the intertidal...
Ocean Acidification (OA) has emerged as a major threat to marine ecosystems, particularly regarding calcifying organisms. A growing body of literature describing laboratory investigations into pH stress indicates broadly deleterious effects for calcifiers, but responses vary greatly across taxa and can be influenced by variations in other environmental characteristics. Scaling...
Environmental stress can negatively affect the ability of organisms to reproduce. Energetic trade-offs exist in all organisms, and under stress, energy may be allocated away from reproduction and towards physiological defense and repair mechanisms. The rocky intertidal environment is ideal for investigating the influence of environmental stress, as organisms are...
The multifaceted role of the environment in regulating the structure and dynamics of biological communities has long fascinated ecologists and motivated much debate and research. Now, in a time of accelerated global changes due to human impacts, the need to understand how the environment shapes communities has gained new urgency....