LTREB Renewal: Ecosystem response to climate change - role of ecological subsidies and species interactions

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The simple phrase 'climate change' encompasses a wide range of events, including unusually severe storms, unexpected freezes or heat waves, disease epidemics, and invasions of exotic species along with chronically increasing temperature, changes in precipitation, or rising sea levels. This project will assemble long-term data for organisms inhabiting a rocky intertidal coastline to understand how key species respond individually and collectively to this highly diverse suite of perturbations. Humans depend on coastal ecosystems for food, recreation, and aesthetics, amplifying the importance of understanding how these ecosystems will change in the future. The research will engage high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in field research, introducing them to the rich world of natural history. Results will be shared with local management agencies, such as the Siuslaw Watershed Council, as well as with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to help manage Oregon?s marine reserve system. Public engagement includes a recent partnership between West Coast researchers and local businesses to elevate public awareness of changes occurring in coastal habitats. Long-term data gathered for Oregon rocky intertidal habitats indicate that key species such as mussels, kelps, and barnacles are responding to multiple aspects of climate change. This project will continue to follow these species and associated organisms to determine sustained trends of species responses to increased warming, more intense storms, rising sea level, and greater variation in these factors. Research extending back as far as 26 years at a set of six study sites along the Oregon coast will be extended and the long-term data analyzed to determine how species abundances vary in space in response to climate-driven variation a) in inputs of nutrients (e.g., algae), particulate food (e.g., mussels), and larvae (e.g., mussels, sea stars, barnacles); b) in losses driven by severe storms; and c) in response to changing interactions among species (e.g., positive and negative effects such as facilitation or predation). A new focus will be on the ochre sea star, an iconic keystone predator that experienced a dramatic decline in abundance in 2014 due to a disease epidemic. Field research will determine how associated species (prey, competitors) will respond to this reduction, whether or not the sea star will rebound to previous levels, and what the consequences of recovery or failure to recover will be for the entire community. With synthesis of over 30 years of data, the final outcome will be a detailed understanding of an important ecological community, how it is likely to change, and its resilience, or ability to rebound from environmental perturbations.