Community response to environmental and biological stress
My research addresses the ecological consequences of one of the most serious threats to marine ecosystems: ocean acidification. I am interested in how experimental and natural acidification shapes community assembly, recruitment, and successional trajectories. Here are a few projects I've been lucky to work on:
My research addresses the ecological consequences of one of the most serious threats to marine ecosystems: ocean acidification. I am interested in how experimental and natural acidification shapes community assembly, recruitment, and successional trajectories. Here are a few projects I've been lucky to work on:
Volcanic CO2 vents are a time capsule to the future, and can be used as a natural laboratory for studying ocean acidification. We used reciprocal transplant experiments along a natural volcanic pCO2 gradient to assess the importance of timing of high pCO2 exposure on patterns of succession in benthic fouling communities and the relative importance of direct acidification effects on colonization vs. indirect effects later in succession.
Read the paper here! |
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In British Columbia, we manipulated CO2 in unique in-situ mesocosms, which captured recruitment and successional dynamics of invertebrate communities from plankton while conserving natural fluctuations in environmental variables. We found that high CO2 promoted homogenized, low diversity communities. Read all about it here!
The sub-lethal physiological responses to ocean acidification are thought to be the result of energetic trade-offs, where maintenance costs increase under stress at the expense of other processes like growth, reproduction and calcification. As a result, a number of studies have generated and tested the hypothesis that negative responses to acidification could be mitigated by high food availability. We clarifying this hypothesis and tested it using meta-analysis. We found that for calcification, food addition did indeed reduce CO2 impacts. Surprisingly, however, we found that food addition actually exacerbated the effects of acidification on growth. Read more about it here! |