Quantifying the dynamics of rocky intertidal sessile communities along the Pacific coast of Japan: implications for ecological resilience

Abstract

Long-term patterns in trajectories of natural communities provide insights into ecological resilience, but their assessment requires long-term census data. We analyzed 16-year census data for intertidal communities from 30 rocky shores along Japan’s Pacific coast to assign community change to four possible trajectories (stable, reversible, abrupt, or linear) representing different aspects of ecological resilience, and to estimate multiple metrics of temporal invariability (species richness, species composition, and community abundance). We examined (1) how the prevalence of the four trajectories differs among regions, (2) how the features (model coefficients) of each trajectory vary among regions, and (3) how the temporal invariabilities differ among trajectories and regions. We found that the stable trajectory was the most common. Its features differed among regions, with a faster recovery to steady-state equilibrium in low-latitude regions. Furthermore, trajectories and temporal invariabilities both varied among regions, seemingly in association with the strength of ocean current fluctuations. Thus, the relationship between community temporal invariability and trajectory may be weak or absent, at least at the regional scale.

The impact of marine heatwaves on rocky intertidal communities: evidence of accumulative carryover effects of marine heatwaves

“…There were differences in MHW intensity (categories I and II, Miyama et al, 2021a;Miyama et al, 2021bvs. categories I-III, Hobday et al, 2018, species composition (Fucus and mussels are not dominant species in our study area; Kanamori et al, 2017;Ishida et al, 2021) and in thermal niches of the component species. More reports on the responses of marine organisms to MHWs are needed for various ecosystems, regions, and organisms, including information on the intensity of MHWs, in order to identify factors that result in differences in responses to MHWs in the same ecosystem.…”

“…The area is within the cold temperate provinces (Spalding et al, 2007) and is impacted by the cold Oyashio current (Payne et al, 2012;Ishida et al, 2021;Miyama et al, 2021a;Miyama et al, 2021b). In the study area, the mid-tidal zone is dominated by the native barnacle Chthamalus dalli and perennial seaweeds such as the crustose coralline alga Corallina pilulifera, the red algae Gloiopeltis furcata and Chondrus yendoi, and the brown alga Analipus japonicus (Kanamori et al, 2017;Ishida et al, 2021). Invertebrate predators include the whelk Nucella lima and the starfish Leptasterias ochotensis (Noda and Ohira, 2020).…”

“…In previous studies, thermal niches were estimated by defining northern (i.e., cold-affinity) species and southern (i.e., warmer-water) species using species occurrence reports (Smale et al, 2017;Sanford et al, 2019). Thus, we obtained occurrence reports for each species from Hayashi (1943;1947);Toyokokujigyo Corporation (1980);Pasco Corporation (1988); Korn and Kulikova (1995); Yoshida (1998); Higo et al (1999); Okutani (2000); Selivanova (2002); Kado (2003); Latypov and Kasyanov (2003); Nishi (2003) Marko and Zaslavskaya (2019); Klochkova et al (2020;; Ohira (2020), andIshida et al (2021). Here, we focused on the distribution of each species in four ecoregions along the coastal northwest Pacific within the temperate northern Pacific realm: Kamchatka Shelf and Coast, Oyashio Current, Northeastern Honshu, and Central Kuroshio Current.…”

“…This is because the species that comprise the macroalgae are relatively dominated by warmer-water species with thermal niches greater than 10 (Tables 8, 9). Four of these species, which include the dominant crustose coralline algae Corallina pilulifera and the red alga Gloiopeltis furcata (Kanamori et al, 2017;Ishida et al, 2021), showed increases in both the mean effect size during the MHWs, and in the effect size in the first and second years after the MHWs (Figure 4). Second, the increase in community abundance of macroalgae may have been caused by a trophic cascade resulting from a decline in herbivorous invertebrate abundance due to MHWs.…”

Biogeography of algae and invertebrates from wave-exposed rocky intertidal habitats along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia (Canada): Latitudinal and interannual patterns and possible underlying drivers

“…Overall, a growing number of studies are documenting rocky intertidal biogeographic patterns and the underlying drivers across the globe. Examples include those done on the NE (Blanchette et al, 2008;Fenberg et al, 2015), SE (Broitman et al, 2001;Ibanez-Erquiaga et al, 2018), SW (Poloczanska et al, 2011;Schiel et al, 2019), and NW (Ishida et al, 2021;Hu and Dong, 2022) Pacific coasts, the Indian Ocean coast (Tsang et al, 2012), the Arctic (Thyrring et al, 2021) and Antarctic (Griffiths and Waller, 2016) coasts, and the NE (Hawkins et al, 2019;Pereira et al, 2022), SE (Bustamante et al, 1997;Hill and McQuaid, 2008), SW (Palomo et al, 2019;Veĺez-Rubio et al, 2021), and NW (Adey and Hayek, 2005) Atlantic coasts. This list of studies is naturally not exhaustive, as related studies are cited in those articles.…”