Hurricane impacts on a coral reef soundscape

Divergent ecological responses to typhoon disturbance revealed via landscape-scale acoustic monitoring

Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events across the globe. Understanding the capacity for ecological communities to withstand and recover from such events is critical. Typhoons are extreme weather events that are expected to broadly homogenize ecological dynamics through structural damage to vegetation and longer-term effects of salinization. Given their unpredictable nature, monitoring ecological responses to typhoons is challenging, particularly for mobile animals such as birds. Here, we report spatially variable ecological responses to typhoons across terrestrial landscapes. Using a high temporal resolution passive acoustic monitoring network across 24 sites on the subtropical island of Okinawa, Japan, we found that typhoons elicit divergent ecological responses among Okinawa's diverse terrestrial habitats, as indicated by increased spatial variability of biological sound production (biophony) and individual species detections. This suggests that soniferous communities are capable of a diversity of different responses to typhoons. That is, spatial insurance effects among local ecological communities provide resilience to typhoons at the landscape scale. Even though site-level typhoon impacts on soundscapes and bird detections were not particularly strong, monitoring at scale with high temporal resolution across a broad spatial extent nevertheless enabled detection of spatial heterogeneity in typhoon responses. Further, species-level responses mirrored those of acoustic indices, underscoring the utility of such indices for revealing insight into fundamental questions concerning disturbance and stability. Our findings demonstrate the significant potential of landscape-scale acoustic sensor networks to capture the understudied ecological impacts of unpredictable extreme weather events.

Changes in the community structure of stony corals in the southern Mexican Caribbean

The Mexican Caribbean coral reef ecosystem has endured the effects of global and regional stressors and, recently, the massive arrivals of the free-living, floating brown algae Sargassum spp. This study aimed to evaluate spatiotemporal changes in the stony coral community structure in the southern Mexican Caribbean by a temporal comparison of live coral cover and colony density using a data set collected in 2008-2009 and a recent survey in 2021 within a Protected Natural Area. A multivariate analysis approach was used to reveal spatiotemporal changes in coral cover and colony densities. Coral cover ranged from 6.9 to 8.9% in 2008-2009 to 6.5% in 2021, the lowest values recorded for the area. Coral colony density ranged from 0.68 to 0.78 colonies m-1 in 2008-2009 to 0.68 colonies m-1 in 2021. The present results appear to represent subtle changes during the last decade.