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Beaudry-Sylvestre M, Benoît HP, Hutchings JA. Coherent long-term body-size responses across all Northwest Atlantic herring populations to warming and environmental change despite contrasting harvest and ecological factors. GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY 2024; 30:e17187. [PMID: 38456203 DOI: 10.1111/gcb.17187] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/23/2023] [Revised: 12/08/2023] [Accepted: 01/23/2024] [Indexed: 03/09/2024]
Abstract
Body size is a key component of individual fitness and an important factor in the structure and functioning of populations and ecosystems. Disentangling the effects of environmental change, harvest and intra- and inter-specific trophic effects on body size remains challenging for populations in the wild. Herring in the Northwest Atlantic provide a strong basis for evaluating hypotheses related to these drivers given that they have experienced significant warming and harvest over the past century, while also having been exposed to a wide range of other selective constraints across their range. Using data on mean length-at-age 4 for the sixteen principal populations over a period of 53 cohorts (1962-2014), we fitted a series of empirical models for temporal and between-population variation in the response to changes in sea surface temperature. We find evidence for a unified cross-population response in the form of a parabolic function according to which populations in naturally warmer environments have responded more negatively to increasing temperature compared with those in colder locations. Temporal variation in residuals from this function was highly coherent among populations, further suggesting a common response to a large-scale environmental driver. The synchrony observed in this study system, despite strong differences in harvest and ecological histories among populations and over time, clearly indicates a dominant role of environmental change on size-at-age in wild populations, in contrast to commonly reported effects of fishing. This finding has important implications for the management of fisheries as it indicates that a key trait associated with population productivity may be under considerably less short-term management control than currently assumed. Our study, overall, illustrates the need for a comparative approach within species for inferences concerning the many possible effects on body size of natural and anthropogenic drivers in the wild.
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Affiliation(s)
- Manuelle Beaudry-Sylvestre
- Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Mont Joli, Quebec, Canada
| | - Hugues P Benoît
- Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Mont Joli, Quebec, Canada
| | - Jeffrey A Hutchings
- Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Institute of Marine Research, Flødevigen Marine Research Station, Bergen, Norway
- Centre for Coastal Research, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
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Liang M, Baiser B, Hallett LM, Hautier Y, Jiang L, Loreau M, Record S, Sokol ER, Zarnetske PL, Wang S. Consistent stabilizing effects of plant diversity across spatial scales and climatic gradients. Nat Ecol Evol 2022; 6:1669-1675. [PMID: 36123533 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01868-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/24/2022] [Accepted: 08/01/2022] [Indexed: 11/09/2022]
Abstract
Biodiversity has widely been documented to enhance local community stability but whether such stabilizing effects of biodiversity extend to broader scales remains elusive. Here, we investigated the relationships between biodiversity and community stability in natural plant communities from quadrat (1 m2) to plot (400 m2) and regional (5-214 km2) scales and across broad climatic conditions, using an extensive plant community dataset from the National Ecological Observatory Network. We found that plant diversity provided consistent stabilizing effects on total community abundance across three nested spatial scales and climatic gradients. The strength of the stabilizing effects of biodiversity increased modestly with spatial scale and decreased as precipitation seasonality increased. Our findings illustrate the generality of diversity-stability theory across scales and climatic gradients, which provides a robust framework for understanding ecosystem responses to biodiversity and climate changes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maowei Liang
- Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Science and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, P. R. China
| | - Benjamin Baiser
- Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
| | - Lauren M Hallett
- Department of Biology and Environmental Studies Program, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
| | - Yann Hautier
- Ecology and Biodiversity Group, Department of Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
| | - Lin Jiang
- School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
| | - Michel Loreau
- Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, Moulis, France
| | - Sydne Record
- Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA
| | - Eric R Sokol
- National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Battelle, Boulder, CO, USA.,Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
| | - Phoebe L Zarnetske
- Department of Integrative Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.,Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
| | - Shaopeng Wang
- Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Science and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, P. R. China.
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Castorani MCN, Bell TW, Walter JA, Reuman D, Cavanaugh KC, Sheppard LW. Disturbance and nutrients synchronise kelp forests across scales through interacting Moran effects. Ecol Lett 2022; 25:1854-1868. [PMID: 35771209 PMCID: PMC9541195 DOI: 10.1111/ele.14066] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/14/2022] [Revised: 05/20/2022] [Accepted: 06/02/2022] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Spatial synchrony is a ubiquitous and important feature of population dynamics, but many aspects of this phenomenon are not well understood. In particular, it is largely unknown how multiple environmental drivers interact to determine synchrony via Moran effects, and how these impacts vary across spatial and temporal scales. Using new wavelet statistical techniques, we characterised synchrony in populations of giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, a widely distributed marine foundation species, and related synchrony to variation in oceanographic conditions across 33 years (1987-2019) and >900 km of coastline in California, USA. We discovered that disturbance (storm-driven waves) and resources (seawater nutrients)-underpinned by climatic variability-act individually and interactively to produce synchrony in giant kelp across geography and timescales. Our findings demonstrate that understanding and predicting synchrony, and thus the regional stability of populations, relies on resolving the synergistic and antagonistic Moran effects of multiple environmental drivers acting on different timescales.
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Affiliation(s)
- Max C. N. Castorani
- Department of Environmental SciencesUniversity of VirginiaCharlottesvilleVirginiaUSA
| | - Tom W. Bell
- Department of Applied Ocean Physics & EngineeringWoods Hole Oceanographic InstitutionWoods HoleMassachusettsUSA
- Earth Research InstituteUniversity of CaliforniaSanta BarbaraCaliforniaUSA
| | - Jonathan A. Walter
- Department of Environmental SciencesUniversity of VirginiaCharlottesvilleVirginiaUSA
| | - Daniel C. Reuman
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyUniversity of KansasLawrenceKansasUSA
- Center for Ecological ResearchUniversity of KansasLawrenceKansasUSA
- Laboratory of PopulationsRockefeller UniversityNew YorkNew YorkUSA
| | - Kyle C. Cavanaugh
- Department of GeographyUniversity of CaliforniaLos AngelesCaliforniaUSA
| | - Lawrence W. Sheppard
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyUniversity of KansasLawrenceKansasUSA
- Marine Biological Association of the United KingdomPlymouthUK
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Yang Q, Hong P, Luo M, Jiang L, Wang S. Dispersal increases spatial synchrony of populations but has weak effects on population variability: a meta-analysis. Am Nat 2022; 200:544-555. [DOI: 10.1086/720715] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/03/2022]
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