Seascape ecology of coastal biogenic habitats: advances, gaps, and challenges

Abstract

We review the progress made in the emerging field of coastal seascape ecology, i.e. the application of landscape ecology concepts and techniques to the coastal marine environment. Since the early 1990s, the landscape ecology approach has been applied in several coastal subtidal and intertidal biogenic habitats across a range of spatial scales. Emerging evidence indicates that animals in these seascapes respond to the structure of patches and patch mosaics in different ways and at different spatial scales, yet we still know very little about the ecological significance of these relationships and the consequences of change in seascape patterning for ecosystem functioning and overall biodiversity. Ecological interactions that occur within patches and among different types of patches (or seascapes) are likely to be critically important in maintaining primary and secondary production, trophic transfer, biodiversity, coastal protection, and supporting a wealth of ecosystem goods and services. We review faunal responses to patch and seascape structure, including effects of fragmentation on 5 focal habitats: seagrass meadows, salt marshes, coral reefs, mangrove forests, and oyster reefs. Extrapolating and generalizing spatial relationships between ecological patterns and processes across scales remains a significant challenge, and we show that there are major gaps in our understanding of these relationships. Filling these gaps will be crucial for managing and responding to an inevitably changing coastal environment. We show that critical ecological thresholds exist in the structural patterning of biogenic ecosystems that, when exceeded, cause abrupt shifts in the distribution and abundance of organisms. A better understanding of faunal-seascape relationships, including the identifications of threshold effects, is urgently needed to support the development of more effective and holistic management actions in restoration, site prioritization, and forecasting the impacts of environmental change.

Seascape ecology in Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows: Linking structure and ecological processes for management

“…References to in situ studies were extracted from previous reviews concerning seagrass seascapes (Boström et al, 2006(Boström et al, , 2011Connolly and Hindell, 2006;Grober-Dunsmore et al, 2009;Heck et al, 2008;Horinouchi, 2007;Kendrick et al, 2005a;Vacchi et al, 2017). To complete this first approach, a search was then performed using the Scopus and Google Scholar data bases, using the keywords 'seagrass'; 'landscape'; 'seascape'; 'patch'; 'structure' and 'architecture'.…”

“…As for meadows formed by other seagrass species, the occurrence and distribution of biota associated with a P. oceanica seascapes are mainly influenced by substratum type and meadow architecture (Boström et al, 2011). The transition between one habitat type and an adjacent different one and that delineating a patch of a given habitat type is called the 'edge' or 'ecotone' (Forman, 1995).…”

“…The number of P. oceanica habitat mapping studies, as well as works assessing their functional role, have increased over the last two decades (Boström et al, 2011;Telesca et al, 2015). It would thus be tempting to extrapolate functional features at a large spatial scale from the available maps to manage coastal habitats.…”

“…Linking direct observations with maps requires addressing aspects of interest indicated by a numerical data, such as width of the edge effect and maximal propagation/dispersal distance of species between one patch and another (Boström et al, 2011;Olds et al, 2016). Unfortunately, even on A.…”

“…The practical value of data from seascape studies is their use to manage marine habitats and to model their evolution, taking into account the ecosystems' key species (Boström et al, 2011). Although this approach is commonly used in terrestrial ecosystems management and conservation (Turner, 1989;Zonneveld, 1995), it is seldom applied to coastal seascapes (Li and Mander, 2009), including seagrass meadows .…”