Resilience and signatures of tropicalization in protected reef fish communities
By A. E. Bates, Neville Barrett, R. Stuart‐Smith, N. Holbrook, P. Thompson, G. Edgar. 2014
159 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Habitat reserves can promote ecological resilience to climate variability by supporting intact trophic webs and large-bodied individuals1, 2, 3. Protection may also alter community responses to long-term climate change by offering habitat for range-shifting species4. Here we analyse the species richness, diversity and functional traits of temperate reef fish communities over 20 years in a global warming hotspot and compare patterns in a marine reserve with nearby sites open to fishing. Species richness and diversity oscillated strongly on the decadal scale. Long-term warming signatures were also present as increasing functional trait richness and functional diversity, driven in part by a general increase in herbivores. Nevertheless, reserve sites were distinguished from fished sites by displaying: greater stability in some aspects of biodiversity; recovery of large-bodied temperate species; resistance to colonization by subtropical vagrants; and less pronounced increases in the community-averaged temperature affinity. We empirically demonstrate that protection from fishing has buffered fluctuations in biodiversity and provided resistance to the initial stages of tropicalization.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb163d7c682d7d8cb0d81edd0c01c78453ae7b74
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In Ecology
In Global and Planetary Change
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Marine Reserves (2015, background): “Beyond temporal variability in community structure, coral reefs exemplify the expectation for reserve-driven cascades to increase resistance to and recovery from disturbance—specifically, increases in herbivore abundance and diversity in reserves, and therefore decreased macroalgae competition with ”
- The performance of protected areas for biodiversity under climate change (2015, background): “Similarly, populations of large-bodied temperate reef fish recovered over 20 years in reserves set up in Tasmania in 1991,resulting in increased stability of biodiversity in those locations and less pronounced invasion by warm-adapted species (Bates et al., 2014).”