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Zoom password: SWES2024
Abstract:
Humans have been shaping our environment for thousands of years, exponentially scaling up our control of natural resources over time. Now, current management strategies and past conservation successes are becoming obsolete as climate and non-climate human impacts push ecosystems towards critical tipping points. In this seminar, I will share examples from coastal seagrasses and marshes illustrating how global change is moving the ecological goalposts for habitat managers by creating novel environmental conditions, shifting species distributions, and rearranging keystone interactions. First, I will discuss how climate extremes and habitat management are reshaping the trajectory of seagrass meadows by facilitating difficult-to-detect shifts in seagrass species dominance. In the Chesapeake Bay, by combining long-term analyses of watershed and seagrass trends with climate change modeling, we explain the global and local drivers of the past and predict how mitigation of local stressors will bolster seagrass resilience to global change. Then, I will describe how large-scale coastal marsh resistance and recovery from climate extremes is controlled by the behavior of an invasive megaconsumer-the feral hog. Using multi-year hog exclusions, drone surveys throughout the Southeast, and mathematical drought-recovery models, we have found that feral hogs trample, wallow, and eat their way through salt marshes to dismantle the positive interactions that control drought response. Because global change creates ecosystems with fundamentally different stressors and species than the past, our capacity to mechanistically link pattern and process across scales hinges upon creative and collaborative interdisciplinary approaches. By determining new ecological roles, describing how shifting global patterns drive local process, and evaluating management strategies for unprecedented futures, we can begin to chart a path forward for adaptive, proactive management of the changing coastline.
Please email Robert Daffron (robert.daffron@ufl.edu) if you have any issues getting into the seminar. Viewers of the live stream may now ask questions by using the chat function. Questions will be read at the end during the question-and-answer portion. In addition, all seminars are archived for viewing on our SWES Seminar Page.