Ecosystem to macroecological tests of how disturbance alters marine food webs

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Oceans provide our society with important services including seafood, tourism, and climate regulation. Over the past decade, however, it has become clear that overfishing and climate change are serious threats. In the face of these mounting threats, the critical challenge for scientists is to determine how oceanic ecosystems work, and thus which components and processes are most essential for us to protect to ensure we have healthy oceans that can deliver ecosystem services over the long-term. To meet this challenge, my lab will carry out detailed in situ observations, experiments, and collections. Further, we will conduct state-of-the-art statistical analyses coupling newly available, high-resolution, satellite remote sensing data, including sea surface temperature and productivity, with species abundance and size data from ocean-wide monitoring programs. Our focus is coral reefs. These diverse economically important ecosystems are among the world's most threatened. We study coral reefs of the central-western Pacific Ocean because this region includes remote reefs that are the world's most pristine, with healthy corals and abundant predators. Previous research has shown that although biodiversity is important for ecosystem function, functional diversity (species that can perform all ecosystem 'tasks') and redundancy (multiple species per task) may be more important than the sheer number of species. Of these 'tasks', predation may be particularly important for stabilizing ecosystems, because predators can stabilize prey populations, preventing them from monopolizing space or energy. By studying intact coral reefs, and comparing them with ones experiencing greater human impacts, we will be able to discern which ecosystem components and processes are in fact most important. This research will inform coral reef conservation, and also provide general insights relevant to the management of Canada's oceanic ecosystems.