OCE-PRF: Understanding substrate mobility as a disturbance in hard rock marine communities

OCE-PRF：了解基质流动性对硬岩海洋群落的干扰

• 批准号: 2126729
• 负责人: Allison Cramer
• 金额: $ 29.57万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-12-01 至 2024-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2126729&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: OCE; PRF; Understanding; substrate; mobility

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Human actions impact marine ecosystems in a variety of ways, including shifting wave and current dynamics through global warming and altering the composition of the ocean floor. These changes, in turn, affect the location and distribution of marine communities. For soft-sediment communities, such as sandy beaches, the interaction between fluid forces and sediment disturbance is well understood. This allows scientists to measure sediment mobility and to create detailed predictions of the impact of human activities on these ecosystems. To date there are no measurements analogous to sediment mobility available for marine hard rock ecosystems. This research will investigate a potential measurement system which connects the forces of waves and currents to the resulting erosion of hard rock substrates and will test and evaluate how these disturbance patterns govern the distribution of communities themselves. By developing and testing this substrate mobility metric, this research will open new avenues of investigation for core ecological hypotheses. In addition, this work will allow managers, conservationists, and engineers to better predict the impact of human-generated change on hard rock marine communities. This project will also support the training and education of groups underrepresented in the geosciences through (1) field and data analysis experience via Research Experiences for Undergraduates summer programs, (2) professional development via mentoring relationships between the fellow and undergraduate trainees, and (3) the expansion of their professional network via cross-institutional coordination.Disturbance, including fluid forces via waves on rocky shores, is well understood as a community organizing and structuring force. Foundational concepts within ecology, such as Connell’s Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis and Menge and Sutherland’s Competition/Predation/Disturbance model, recognize that communities exist within a complex mosaic of physical and biological disturbance. This mosaic presents challenges when measuring disturbance regimes since the scales, causes, and consequences of disturbance vary between systems. However, in the marine environment, substrate mobility represents an explicit measure of disturbance impact present across marine ecosystems. This project will determine how to measure substrate mobility on hard substrates through collaboration with USGS geologists. In addition, this research will investigate a mechanism for disturbance via substrate mobility on benthic organisms through lab experiments and use field surveys to compare patterns of substrate mobility with the distribution of benthic communities and species functional groups. Explicitly quantifying the realized movement of hard substrate in response to fluid forcing integrates hard substrates into the already well understood sediment disturbance paradigm. This results in a universal framework of marine disturbance that is potentially revolutionary as it allows for comparative questions spanning a huge diversity of marine ecosystems, from coral reefs to the abyssal plain. This mechanistic framework provides a new connection between the disciplines of geomorphology and marine ecology.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.

该奖项全部或部分由2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。人类活动以各种方式影响海洋生态系统，包括通过全球变暖改变波浪和水流动力，以及改变海底的组成。这些变化反过来又影响到海洋群落的位置和分布。对于软沉积物群落，如桑迪，流体力和沉积物扰动之间的相互作用是众所周知的。这使科学家能够测量沉积物的流动性，并详细预测人类活动对这些生态系统的影响。迄今为止，还没有类似于海洋硬岩生态系统沉积物流动性的测量方法。这项研究将调查一个潜在的测量系统，该系统将波浪和水流的力量与由此产生的坚硬岩石基底的侵蚀联系起来，并将测试和评估这些干扰模式如何支配社区本身的分布。通过开发和测试这种基质流动性度量，这项研究将为核心生态假说的研究开辟新的途径。此外，这项工作将使管理人员，环保主义者和工程师能够更好地预测人为变化对硬岩海洋群落的影响。该项目还将通过以下方式支持地球科学领域代表性不足的群体的培训和教育：（1）通过本科生暑期项目的研究经验获得现场和数据分析经验，（2）通过研究员和本科生学员之间的指导关系获得专业发展，以及（3）通过跨机构协调扩大他们的专业网络。干扰，包括通过岩石海岸上的波浪产生的流体力量，被很好地理解为一种社区组织和结构力量。生态学中的基本概念，如康奈尔的中间干扰假说和门吉和萨瑟兰的竞争/捕食/干扰模型，认识到社区存在于一个复杂的马赛克的物理和生物干扰。这种马赛克提出了挑战时，测量干扰制度，因为规模，原因和干扰的后果各不相同的系统。然而，在海洋环境中，基质流动性是对整个海洋生态系统的干扰影响的明确衡量。该项目将通过与美国地质勘探局地质学家的合作，确定如何测量硬基底上的基底迁移率。此外，本研究将透过实验室实验探讨底质流动对底栖生物的干扰机制，并利用实地调查比较底质流动模式与底栖生物群落和物种功能群的分布。明确量化的实现运动的硬基板在流体强迫集成到已经很好地理解沉积物扰动范例硬基板。这就产生了一个可能具有革命性的海洋扰动普遍框架，因为它允许对从珊瑚礁到深海平原的各种海洋生态系统进行比较。这一机制框架为地貌学和海洋生态学学科之间提供了新的联系。该奖项反映了NSF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。