Collaborative research: Patterns, causes, and consequences of synchrony in giant kelp populations

分布在不同的、通常相距遥远的地方的生物种群可以以类似的方式随着时间的推移而发生变化。这种被称为同步的自然现象对于影响社会福祉的许多问题都很重要，例如医学、公共卫生、保护和自然资源管理方面的问题。例如，同步性对动植物种群的持久性、稳定性和恢复力至关重要，并可能对生物多样性、生态系统功能和相关的社会效益产生级联效应。然而，同步的许多方面都没有得到很好的解决。例如，了解多种潜在的同步驱动因素的影响，如气候事件和捕食者，一直是生态学的长期挑战。此外，同步的原因可能会随着空间、时间和时间尺度而变化（例如，年同步与年代际同步），但这种潜力很少被探索，特别是在海洋生态系统中。同步对不同生态群落动态的影响，以及同步跨生态系统边界（例如，从海洋到陆地）产生级联效应的可能性，也未得到充分研究。解决这些差距尤为紧迫，因为越来越多的证据表明，气候变化可能改变同步模式，可能导致生态系统空间复原力下降。本项目研究沿海海带森林和沙滩生态系统，以解决目前对同步性理解的几个空白。该项目产生知识，以提高对这些具有经济价值的环境和它们所维持的许多生物的理解。更广泛的影响通过跨职业阶段的研究人员的指导和沿海生态学和数据科学的学生培训扩展。为了改善来自科学领域代表性不足群体的学生的教育机会，该项目创建了一个沿海-中心地带海洋生物学交流项目，在这个项目中，来自中西部的本科生前往加利福尼亚进行沿海实地研究，来自洛杉矶的对海洋生物学感兴趣的本科生前往堪萨斯学习生物统计学。为了使近年来急剧减少的加利福尼亚海带林的管理受益，将与沿海管理者、保护从业者和其他利益相关者一起举办研讨会，以确定恢复地点，以加强区域恢复、稳定和复原力。方法、软件和跨科学学科可用的数据按照可重复和透明的标准在线发布。该项目的目的是研究巨藻森林同步的模式和原因及其对沿海生态系统结构和功能的影响。通过整合和利用大量长期、大规模的数据集，并使用新的统计技术对其进行分析，研究人员评估了过去36年里，海洋条件、繁殖体扩散和海桐草食如何相互作用，从而构成了东北太平洋10度纬度地区巨带种群的同步性和稳定性。新的小波建模工具和其他统计技术被用来量化同步的驱动因素，以及它们如何在地理、时间和时间尺度上运作。利用20年的珊瑚礁生物多样性空间时间序列，将确定巨型海带和其他因素如何通过“同步级联”诱导林下藻类物种群落的同步。此外，该团队还测试了巨型海带通过运输和沉积异域有机物（海带残骸）跨越生态系统边界传播到沙滩的程度，以及这种空间补贴如何产生自下而上的海滩无脊椎动物和滨鸟的同步级联。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Populations of organisms located in different, often far-apart places can change over time in similar ways. This natural phenomenon, known as synchrony, is important to many issues affecting societal well-being, such as those in medicine, public health, conservation, and natural resource management. For instance, synchrony is critical to the persistence, stability, and resilience of plant and animal populations, and can have cascading effects on biodiversity, ecosystem function, and associated benefits to society. However, many aspects of synchrony are poorly resolved. For example, understanding the influence of multiple potential drivers of synchrony—such as climatic events and predators—has been a longstanding challenge in ecology. Moreover, the causes of synchrony may change over space, time, and timescale (e.g., annual vs. decadal synchrony), but this potential is rarely explored, especially in marine ecosystems. The consequences of synchrony for the dynamics of diverse ecological communities, and the potential for synchrony to have cascading effects across ecosystem boundaries (e.g., from sea to land), are also understudied. Addressing these gaps is especially pressing because growing evidence indicates that climate change may alter patterns of synchrony, potentially leading to diminished spatial resilience of ecosystems. This project studies coastal kelp forests and sandy beach ecosystems to address several current gaps in the understanding of synchrony. The project generates knowledge to improve the understanding of these economically-valuable environments and the many organisms that they sustain. Broader impacts extend through the mentorship of researchers across career stages and student training in coastal ecology and data science. To improve educational opportunities for students from groups underrepresented in science, the project creates a Coastal-Heartland Marine Biology Exchange, in which undergraduates from the Midwest travel to California to carry out coastal field research, and undergraduates from Los Angeles interested in marine biology travel to Kansas to learn biostatistics. To benefit the management of kelp forests in California that have suffered dramatic declines in recent years, workshops will be hosted with coastal managers, conservation practitioners, and other stakeholders to identify restoration sites to enhance regional recovery, stability, and resilience. Methods, software, and data that are useable across scientific disciplines are published online following reproducible and transparent standards.The objective of this project is to investigate the patterns and causes of synchrony in giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) forests and the consequences for coastal ecosystem structure and function. By integrating and leveraging numerous long-term, large-scale datasets and analyzing them with new statistical techniques, the investigators assess how oceanographic conditions, propagule dispersal, and sea urchin herbivory interact to structure the synchrony and stability of giant kelp populations over the past 36 years across 10 degrees of latitude in the northeast Pacific Ocean. New wavelet modeling tools and other statistical techniques are used to quantify the drivers of synchrony and how they operate across geography, time, and timescales. Using a 20-year spatial timeseries of reef biodiversity, it will be determined how giant kelp and other factors induce synchrony in a speciose community of understory algae through ‘cascades of synchrony’. Moreover, the team tests the degree to which giant kelp synchrony propagates across ecosystem boundaries to sandy beaches through the transport and deposition of allochthonous organic matter (kelp wrack), and how such spatial subsidies produce bottom-up cascades of synchrony to beach invertebrates and shorebirds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.