Future sea-level rise drives rocky intertidal habitat loss and benthic community change

PeerJ

article

Nikolas J. Kaplanis¹  Clinton B. Edwards²  Yoan Eynaud²  Jennifer E. Smith² 

[1] Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California;Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California

关键词: Sea-level rise;    Rocky intertidal;    Habitat loss;    Photogrammetry;    Structure-from-motion;    Remote sensing;    Climate change;    Large-area imaging;    LiDAR;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.9186

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

The impacts of sea-level rise (SLR) are likely to be the greatest for ecosystems that exist at the land-sea interface, where small changes in sea-level could result in drastic changes in habitat availability. Rocky intertidal ecosystems possess a number of characteristics which make them highly vulnerable to changes in sea-level, yet our understanding of potential community-scale responses to future SLR scenarios is limited. Combining remote-sensing with in-situ large-area imaging, we quantified habitat extent and characterized the biological community at two rocky intertidal study locations in California, USA. We then used a model-based approach to estimate how a range of SLR scenarios would affect total habitat area, areal extent of dominant benthic space occupiers, and numerical abundance of invertebrates. Our results suggest that SLR will reduce total available rocky intertidal habitat area at our study locations, leading to an overall decrease in areal extent of dominant benthic space occupiers, and a reduction in invertebrate abundances. As large-scale environmental changes, such as SLR, accelerate in the next century, more extensive spatially explicit monitoring at ecologically relevant scales will be needed to visualize and quantify their impacts to biological systems.

【 授权许可】

CC BY