ORCID Profile
0000-0002-8787-1786
Current Organisation
University of Maryland Center For Environmental Sciences
Does something not look right? The information on this page has been harvested from data sources that may not be up to date. We continue to work with information providers to improve coverage and quality. To report an issue, use the Feedback Form.
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Conservation and biodiversity | Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) | Environmental management | Environmental assessment and monitoring
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 13-07-2017
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 23-12-2020
Abstract: Primary productivity of marine ecosystems is largely driven by broad gradients in environmental and ecological properties. By contrast, secondary productivity tends to be more variable, influenced by bottom-up (resource-driven) and top-down (predatory) processes, other environmental drivers, and mediation by the physical structure of habitats. Here, we use a continental-scale dataset on small mobile invertebrates (epifauna), common on surfaces in all marine ecosystems, to test influences of potential drivers of temperature-standardized secondary production across a large biogeographic range. We found epifaunal production to be remarkably consistent along a temperate to tropical Australian latitudinal gradient of 28.6°, spanning kelp forests to coral reefs (approx. 3500 km). Using a model selection procedure, epifaunal production was primarily related to biogenic habitat group, which explained up to 45% of total variability. Production was otherwise invariant to predictors capturing primary productivity, the local biomass of fishes (proxy for predation pressure), and environmental, geographical, and human impacts. Highly predictable levels of epifaunal productivity associated with distinct habitat groups across continental scales should allow accurate modelling of the contributions of these ubiquitous invertebrates to coastal food webs, thus improving understanding of likely changes to food web structure with ocean warming and other anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems.
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 08-2022
Abstract: Distribution of Earth’s biomes is structured by the match between climate and plant traits, which in turn shape associated communities and ecosystem processes and services. However, that climate–trait match can be disrupted by historical events, with lasting ecosystem impacts. As Earth’s environment changes faster than at any time in human history, critical questions are whether and how organismal traits and ecosystems can adjust to altered conditions. We quantified the relative importance of current environmental forcing versus evolutionary history in shaping the growth form (stature and biomass) and associated community of eelgrass ( Zostera marina ), a widespread foundation plant of marine ecosystems along Northern Hemisphere coastlines, which experienced major shifts in distribution and genetic composition during the Pleistocene. We found that eelgrass stature and biomass retain a legacy of the Pleistocene colonization of the Atlantic from the ancestral Pacific range and of more recent within-basin bottlenecks and genetic differentiation. This evolutionary legacy in turn influences the biomass of associated algae and invertebrates that fuel coastal food webs, with effects comparable to or stronger than effects of current environmental forcing. Such historical lags in phenotypic acclimatization may constrain ecosystem adjustments to rapid anthropogenic climate change, thus altering predictions about the future functioning of ecosystems.
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 23-02-2022
Abstract: While considerable evidence exists of biogeographic patterns in the intensity of species interactions, the influence of these patterns on variation in community structure is less clear. Studying how the distributions of traits in communities vary along global gradients can inform how variation in interactions and other factors contribute to the process of community assembly. Using a model selection approach on measures of trait dispersion in crustaceans associated with eelgrass ( Zostera marina ) spanning 30° of latitude in two oceans, we found that dispersion strongly increased with increasing predation and decreasing latitude. Ocean and epiphyte load appeared as secondary predictors Pacific communities were more overdispersed while Atlantic communities were more clustered, and increasing epiphytes were associated with increased clustering. By examining how species interactions and environmental filters influence community structure across biogeographic regions, we demonstrate how both latitudinal variation in species interactions and historical contingency shape these responses. Community trait distributions have implications for ecosystem stability and functioning, and integrating large-scale observations of environmental filters, species interactions and traits can help us predict how communities may respond to environmental change.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2023
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2015
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2014
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 09-2013
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE12529
Abstract: Species richness has dominated our view of global bio ersity patterns for centuries. The dominance of this paradigm is reflected in the focus by ecologists and conservation managers on richness and associated occurrence-based measures for understanding drivers of broad-scale ersity patterns and as a biological basis for management. However, this is changing rapidly, as it is now recognized that not only the number of species but the species present, their phenotypes and the number of in iduals of each species are critical in determining the nature and strength of the relationships between species ersity and a range of ecological functions (such as biomass production and nutrient cycling). Integrating these measures should provide a more relevant representation of global bio ersity patterns in terms of ecological functions than that provided by simple species counts. Here we provide comparisons of a traditional global bio ersity distribution measure based on richness with metrics that incorporate species abundances and functional traits. We use data from standardized quantitative surveys of 2,473 marine reef fish species at 1,844 sites, spanning 133 degrees of latitude from all ocean basins, to identify new ersity hotspots in some temperate regions and the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. These relate to high ersity of functional traits amongst in iduals in the community (calculated using Rao's Q), and differ from previously reported patterns in functional ersity and richness for terrestrial animals, which emphasize species-rich tropical regions only. There is a global trend for greater evenness in the number of in iduals of each species, across the reef fish species observed at sites ('community evenness'), at higher latitudes. This contributes to the distribution of functional ersity hotspots and contrasts with well-known latitudinal gradients in richness. Our findings suggest that the contribution of species ersity to a range of ecosystem functions varies over large scales, and imply that in tropical regions, which have higher numbers of species, each species contributes proportionally less to community-level ecological processes on average than species in temperate regions. Metrics of ecological function usefully complement metrics of species ersity in conservation management, including when identifying planning priorities and when tracking changes to bio ersity values.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-10-2020
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-020-19252-4
Abstract: Eutrophication is a widespread environmental change that usually reduces the stabilizing effect of plant ersity on productivity in local communities. Whether this effect is scale dependent remains to be elucidated. Here, we determine the relationship between plant ersity and temporal stability of productivity for 243 plant communities from 42 grasslands across the globe and quantify the effect of chronic fertilization on these relationships. Unfertilized local communities with more plant species exhibit greater asynchronous dynamics among species in response to natural environmental fluctuations, resulting in greater local stability (alpha stability). Moreover, neighborhood communities that have greater spatial variation in plant species composition within sites (higher beta ersity) have greater spatial asynchrony of productivity among communities, resulting in greater stability at the larger scale (gamma stability). Importantly, fertilization consistently weakens the contribution of plant ersity to both of these stabilizing mechanisms, thus diminishing the positive effect of bio ersity on stability at differing spatial scales. Our findings suggest that preserving grassland functional stability requires conservation of plant ersity within and among ecological communities.
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 26-10-2020
Abstract: Consumption transfers energy and materials through food chains and fundamentally influences ecosystem productivity. Therefore, mapping the distribution of consumer feeding intensity is key to understanding how environmental changes influence bio ersity, with consequent effects on trophic transfer and top–down impacts through food webs. Our global comparison of standardized bait consumption in shallow coastal habitats finds a peak in feeding intensity away from the equator that is better explained by the presence of particular consumer families than by latitude or temperature. This study complements recent demonstrations that changes in bio ersity can have similar or larger impacts on ecological processes than those of climate.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-02-2020
DOI: 10.1111/OIK.06802
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-07-2019
DOI: 10.1002/FEE.2088
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 28-09-2020
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-021-96799-2
Abstract: To better understand the decline of one of earth’s most bio erse habitats, coral reefs, many survey programs employ regular photographs of the benthos. An emerging challenge is the time required to annotate the large volume of digital imagery generated by these surveys. Here, we leverage existing machine-learning tools (CoralNet) and develop new fit-to-purpose programs to process and score benthic photoquadrats using five years of data from the Smithsonian MarineGEO Network’s bio ersity monitoring program at Carrie Bow Cay, Belize. Our analysis shows that scleractinian coral cover on forereef sites (at depths of 3–10 m) along our surveyed transects increased significantly from 6 to 13% during this period. More modest changes in macroalgae, turf algae, and sponge cover were also observed. Community-wide analysis confirmed a significant shift in benthic structure, and follow-up in situ surveys of coral demographics in 2019 revealed that the emerging coral communities are dominated by fast-recruiting and growing coral species belonging to the genera Agaricia and Porites . While the positive trajectory reported here is promising, Belizean reefs face persistent challenges related to overfishing and climate change. Open-source computational toolkits offer promise for increasing the efficiency of reef monitoring, and therefore our ability to assess the future of coral reefs in the face of rapid environmental change.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 19-11-2018
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-2018
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.12729
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 21-01-2021
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-021-20997-9
Abstract: A Correction to this paper has been published: 0.1038/s41467-021-20997-9.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 02-2017
Location: United States of America
Location: United States of America
Location: United States of America
Start Date: 08-2023
End Date: 08-2026
Amount: $625,764.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity