Urban marine ecology in southern California: the ability of riprap structures to serve as rocky intertidal habitat

By B. Pister. 2009

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing human populations along marine coastlines has lead to increasing urbanization of the marine environment. Despite decades of investigations on terrestrial ecosystems, the effect of urbanization on marine life is not well understood. Riprap is the rocky rubble used to build jetties, breakwaters, and armored shorelines. Roughly 30% of the southern California shoreline supports some form of riprap, while 29% of the shoreline is natural rocky substrate. Astonishingly few studies have investigated this anthropogenic rocky habitat even though it rivals a natural habitat in area on a regional scale along a coastline that has been extensively studied. In this study, I compared the diversity and community structure of exposed rocky intertidal communities on four riprap and four natural sites in southern California. I ask the following questions: (1) does diversity or community composition differ between intertidal communities on riprap and natural rocky habitats in southern California, (2) if so, which organisms contribute to those differences, (3) which physical factors are contributing to these differences, and (4) do riprap habitats support higher abundances of invasive species than natural habitats? On average, riprap and natural rocky habitats in wave exposed environments in southern California did not differ from each other in diversity or community composition when considering the entire assemblage. However, when only mobile species were considered, they occurred in greater diversity on natural shores. These differences appear to be driven by wave exposure. The presence of invasive species was negligible in both natural and riprap habitats.

Subfields: Ecology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5423fd8c79bb785e0748e51710bdaa5813bd8ebe

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology

1. Richard C. Thompson
2. Louise B. Firth
3. A. Knights
4. S. Hawkins

In Oceanography

1. Louise B. Firth
2. Richard C. Thompson
3. A. Knights
4. S. Hawkins

Citations in the corpus

• The importance of water‐retaining features for biodiversity on artificial intertidal coastal defence structures (2013, background): “Despite the potential for these structures to provide habitat, they generally support lower biodiversity than adjacent natu-ral rocky habitats (Chapman & Bulleri, 2003; Moschella et al. , 2005; Pister, 2009).”
• Is global ocean sprawl a cause of jellyfish blooms (2013, unknown): “Filter feeders, Polyp California (US) Riprap Pister (2009) including hydroids”