Regime shifts and alternative stable states in intertidal rocky habitats: State of the art and new trends of research

Chemello, Silvia; Vizzini, Salvatrice; Mazzola, Antonio

doi:10.1016/j.ecss.2018.09.013

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…A combination of eutrophication, climate change, overfishing and deterioration of fish spawning habitats are thus currently suspected to be responsible for some of these regime shifts in temperate coastal waters (Jackson et al 2001;Harley et al 2006;Spencer et al 2011;Chemello et al 2018;Kraufvelin et al 2018). In the northeast Atlantic and in the Baltic Sea, weakened top-down effects due to decreased abundance and size of piscivore fish have been demonstrated (Moksnes et al 2008;Eriksson et al 2009Eriksson et al , 2011Sieben et al 2011;Östman et al 2016).…”

Section: Reviewed By P Brooks and An Undisclosed Expertmentioning

confidence: 99%

Top-down release of mesopredatory fish is a weaker structuring driver of temperate rocky shore communities than bottom-up nutrient enrichment

2020

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Ecological impacts of top-down trophic cascades in combination with bottom-up nutrient enrichment are increasingly being reported. Such effects may be triggered by decline in the abundance and size of piscivore fish leading to a release of smallersized mesopredatory fish that are capable of reducing mesograzers and their buffering herbivorous effects, thus intensifying eutrophication symptoms. Hitherto, such mesopredator release has not been studied in controlled manner in macroalgaldominated rocky shore communities. This study utilised twelve littoral mesocosms in southeastern Norway to investigate the impact of increased nutrient levels and increased abundance of the mesopredatory goldsinny wrasse (Ctenolabrus rupestris) over 6 months, from spring (April) to autumn (October). The study mainly revealed typical eutrophication responses in both July and in October with nutrient enrichment leading to more ephemeral algae and less perennial Fucacean and red macroalgae. Significant responses to the addition of mesopredatory fish alone or with nutrients in combination were clearly fewer in July and almost non-existent in October. Mesopredatory fish reduced the number of some mesograzers, but not others, and some herbivores even benefitted. Few joint effects occurred between fish and nutrients and the anticipated negative consequences for perennial macrophytes were largely absent; the possible reasons for these observations are discussed in depth. Curiously, the presence of mesopredatory fish seems to favour some canopy-forming macrophytes. This last finding warrants further investigation as the labrid fishery in coastal waters of southern Norway and western Sweden is increasing and a too heavy reduction of mesopredators may have its own unforeseen ecosystem implications.

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Section: Reviewed By P Brooks and An Undisclosed Expertmentioning

confidence: 99%

Top-down release of mesopredatory fish is a weaker structuring driver of temperate rocky shore communities than bottom-up nutrient enrichment

2020

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“…Spatial patterns of benthic assemblages were driven by differences in the coverage of macroalgae and anthozoans on intertidal reefs. The outcomes of macroalgae-anthozoa shifts to biodiversity and productivity vary across ecosystems (Norström et al 2009;Chemello et al 2018). Substrate rugosity is a major driver of benthic biodiversity on rocky shores (Guichard et al, 2001;Cruz-Mota et al, 2010;Bloch & Klingbeil, 2016) and coral reefs (Zawada et al, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peer Review #1 of "Substrate rugosity and temperature matters: patterns of benthic diversity at tropical intertidal reefs in the SW Atlantic (v0.1)"

2020

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Modeling and forecasting ocean ecosystems in a changing world will require advances in observational efforts to monitor marine biodiversity. One of the observational challenges in coastal reef ecosystems is to quantify benthic and climate interactions which are key to community dynamics across different habitats. However, habitat complexity (i.e. substrate rugosity) on intertidal reefs can be an important variable explaining benthic diversity and taxa composition, but the association of substrate and seasonal variability is poorly understood on lateritic reefs on the South Atlantic. We asked if benthic assemblages on intertidal reefs with distinct substrate rugosity would follow similar seasonal patterns of succession following meteo-oceanographic variability in a tropical coastal area of Brazil. We combined an innovative 3D imaging for measuring substrate rugosity with satellite monitoring to monitor spatio-temporal patterns of benthic assemblages. The dataset included monthly in situ surveys of substrate cover and taxon diversity and richness, temporal variability in meteo-oceanographic conditions, and reef structural complexity from four sites on the Eastern Marine Ecoregion of Brazil. Additionally, correlation coefficients between temperature and both benthic diversity and community composition from one year of monitoring were used to project biodiversity trends under future warming scenarios. Our results revealed that benthic diversity and composition on intertidal reefs are strongly regulated by surface rugosity and sea surface temperatures, which control the dominance of macroalgae or corals. Intertidal reef biodiversity was positively correlated with reef rugosity which supports previous assertions of higher regional intertidal diversity on lateritic reefs that offer increased substrate complexity. Predicted warming temperatures in the Eastern Marine Ecoregion of Brazil will likely lead to a dominance of macroalgae taxa over the lateritic reefs and lower overall benthic diversity. Our findings indicate that rugosity is not only a useful tool for biodiversity mapping in reef intertidal ecosystems but also that spatial differences in rugosity would lead to very distinct biogeographic and temporal patterns. This study offers a unique baseline of benthic biodiversity on coastal marine habitats that is complementary to worldwide efforts to

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“…Specific configurations allow local shifts to be induced by a variation in the exchange flux at regional scales without resting on Hill functions. This possibility was not considered in most prior ecological studies, even if most of the experimental designs that were proposed (especially in marine ecology) consisted of clearing areas and observing the re-colonization of individuals supplied by other sites [52]. This led us to consider whether small fluxes of individuals could displace a null equilibrium to positive values and trigger a shift to AS states.…”

Section: Studies On Alternate Stable States Remain Firmly Theoreticalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alternate Stable States Theory: Critical Evaluation and Relevance to Marine Conservation

Guarini,

Coston-Guarini

2024

JMSE

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In their 2023 book, “The Blue Compendium: From Knowledge to Action for a Sustainable Ocean Economy”, Lubchenko and Haugan invoked alternate stable (AS) states marginally as an undesired consequence of sources of disturbance on populations, communities and ecosystems. They did not provide detailed arguments, but considered the existence of AS states as a given. Conversely, May, in his 1977 Nature article, pointed out that, when applied to systems that are complex, “the [AS states] theory remains largely metaphorical”. This is the starting point of this critical review, which aims to re-examine the general theory behind AS states in ecological systems and its applications to marine ecology and conservation. The focus is first on theory, taking as examples communities that sustain competition and studying the relative importance of the fluxes of individuals between simple low-dimension, interconnected systems. We find that a minimal formulation of fluxes is sufficient to obtain a set of non-null multiple stable (MS) states and to trigger shifts between AS states when fluxes become large enough. This provides new insights into the theory of rescue and mass effects by distinguishing them through a threshold at which the system dynamics shift from one stable equilibrium to another. Then, we consider how the theoretical framework of AS states has been applied in marine environments. It appears that many applications have confounded shifts between AS states and changes in the structure of systems, particularly when the complexity of the systems increases. The main difficulty for any application remains that the concepts of MS and AS states can only be established and validated for low-dimension systems and simplified experiments. This is because the mathematical properties of models that describe large-dimension, complex systems deviate from the observed characteristics of their real-world counterparts. There are many intriguing scientific challenges around the plausible shifts between AS states, but a deeper understanding and characterization of their occurrence in nature would require a significant investment in modeling to formulate predictive ecosystem models.

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Regime shifts and alternative stable states in intertidal rocky habitats: State of the art and new trends of research

Cited by 9 publications

References 57 publications

Top-down release of mesopredatory fish is a weaker structuring driver of temperate rocky shore communities than bottom-up nutrient enrichment

Top-down release of mesopredatory fish is a weaker structuring driver of temperate rocky shore communities than bottom-up nutrient enrichment

Peer Review #1 of "Substrate rugosity and temperature matters: patterns of benthic diversity at tropical intertidal reefs in the SW Atlantic (v0.1)"

Alternate Stable States Theory: Critical Evaluation and Relevance to Marine Conservation

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