OCE-PRF: Variability in connectivity and receptivity of highly dynamic coastal ecosystems: implications for community structure and function in a recipient soft-sediment ecosystem

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Coastal ecosystems face pressures from both the land and the sea, including development and sea level rise. It is important to better understand how coastal ecosystems function so that predictions can be made about how they may change under future conditions and to better manage these environments now and in the future. This project will use long-term data, observational studies, and experiments to learn more about the relationship between kelp forests and sandy beaches. Specifically, this project will explore how waves, tides, and sea level control the amount of kelp wrack that washes ashore, how the condition of kelp forests impacts the ecology of sandy beaches, and how beach wrack provides habitat and food for animals that live or find food on beaches. This project will develop new research methods using drones and start new, long-term monitoring datasets that will contribute to the conservation of these important coastal ecosystems. Additionally, this project will support the next generation of marine scientists and increase diversity in the field by providing research opportunities and mentoring to under-represented minorities at the undergraduate and high school levels. This project will also increase community awareness of coastal ecosystems and conservation issues through Earth Day participation, guest lecturing at public high schools, and public biology days at the university. Cross-ecosystem connectivity is a critical feature of many ecosystems and has important implications for food webs, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Sandy beach ecosystems provide a unique study system for the role of ecosystem subsidies because of strong natural gradients in the type and amount of marine wrack inputs and the dependence of multiple trophic levels on wrack for food and habitat. The proposed research will use a combination of observations, experiments, and theory to explore how environmental attributes, including ecosystem connectivity, food web subsidies, and natural variation work across scales to affect multiple levels of biological organization and ecosystem functioning. This study will utilize nearshore rocky reefs and sandy beaches to understand the fate of subsidies under varying environmental conditions, determine how variability and stability in a donor ecosystem affects the structure and function of the recipient ecosystem, and to explore how variability in the type and supply rate of subsidies affects its colonization and remineralization. This project will also initiate and contribute to long-term monitoring datasets and utilize unoccupied aerial vehicle-based methodology and analyses to quantify ecosystem subsidy dynamics and fate across spatial and temporal scales. Using a natural gradient in kelp forest persistence and a manipulative field experiment varying subsidy inputs, it will explore how subsidy variability impacts the biodiversity of multiple sandy beach trophic groups. Field experiments will be utilized to better constrain the dynamics and fate of subsidies over time and across a range of oceanographic and beach conditions. This research will expand understanding of the coupling between kelp forests and beaches and the fate of detrital kelp export. Results from field surveys and experiments will also further elucidate the importance of ecosystem connectivity for critical ecosystem functions from promoting and maintaining biodiversity to secondary productivity and other aspects of this detrital food web. This study will have implications for management and conservation of coastal ecosystems in the face of reduced connectivity, increased variability, and loss of food resources and habitat associated with global climate change and other direct anthropogenic pressures.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.