Spencer A. Wood

More than a meal… integrating non‐feeding interactions into food webs

Organisms eating each other are only one of many types of well documented and important interactions among species. Other such types include habitat modification, predator interference and facilitation. However, ecological network research has been typically limited to either pure food webs or to networks of only a few (<3) interaction types. The great diversity of non-trophic interactions observed in nature has been poorly addressed by ecologists and largely excluded from network theory. Herein, we propose a conceptual framework that organises this diversity into three main functional classes defined by how they modify specific parameters in a dynamic food web model. This approach provides a path forward for incorporating non-trophic interactions in traditional food web models and offers a new perspective on tackling ecological complexity that should stimulate both theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding the patterns and dynamics of diverse species interactions in nature.

Modeling benefits from nature: using ecosystem services to inform coastal and marine spatial planning

People around the world are looking to marine ecosystems to provide additional benefits to society. As they consider expanding current uses and investing in new ones, new management approaches are needed that will sustain the delivery of the diverse benefits that people want and need. An ecosystem services framework provides metrics for assessing the quantity, quality, and value of benefits obtained from different portfolios of uses. Such a framework has been developed for assessments on land, and is now being developed for application to marine ecosystems. Here, we present marine Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), a new tool to assess (i.e., map, model, and value) multiple services provided by marine ecosystems. It allows one to estimate changes in a suite of services under different management scenarios and to investigate trade-offs among the scenarios, including implications of drivers like climate. We describe key inputs and outputs of each of the component ecosystem service models and present results from an application to the West Coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The results demonstrate how marine InVEST can be used to help shape the dialogue and inform decision making in a marine spatial planning context.

Embedding ecosystem services in coastal planning leads to better outcomes for people and nature

Significance Oceans and coasts provide people with diverse benefits, from fisheries that sustain lives and livelihoods to recreational opportunities that generate tourism. However, translating appreciation of these benefits into changes in management and policy is not trivial. We report on a ground-breaking effort to use ecosystem-service values and models within a coastal planning process. By accounting for spatial variation in the influence of human activities on services, our results allowed stakeholders and policymakers to refine zones of human use, reduce risk to ecosystems, and enhance delivery of multiple ocean and coastal benefits. Application of our approaches and tools will enable planners worldwide to bring ecosystem-service science to bear on real-world decisions, thus directing actions that protect ecosystems and their benefits for people. Recent calls for ocean planning envision informed management of social and ecological systems to sustain delivery of ecosystem services to people. However, until now, no coastal and marine planning process has applied an ecosystem-services framework to understand how human activities affect the flow of benefits, to create scenarios, and to design a management plan. We developed models that quantify services provided by corals, mangroves, and seagrasses. We used these models within an extensive engagement process to design a national spatial plan for Belize’s coastal zone. Through iteration of modeling and stakeholder engagement, we developed a preferred plan, currently under formal consideration by the Belizean government. Our results suggest that the preferred plan will lead to greater returns from coastal protection and tourism than outcomes from scenarios oriented toward achieving either conservation or development goals. The plan will also reduce impacts to coastal habitat and increase revenues from lobster fishing relative to current management. By accounting for spatial variation in the impacts of coastal and ocean activities on benefits that ecosystems provide to people, our models allowed stakeholders and policymakers to refine zones of human use. The final version of the preferred plan improved expected coastal protection by >25% and more than doubled the revenue from fishing, compared with earlier versions based on stakeholder preferences alone. Including outcomes in terms of ecosystem-service supply and value allowed for explicit consideration of multiple benefits from oceans and coasts that typically are evaluated separately in management decisions.

Network structure beyond food webs: mapping non-trophic and trophic interactions on Chilean rocky shores

How multiple types of non-trophic interactions map onto trophic networks in real communities remains largely unknown. We present the first effort, to our knowledge, describing a comprehensive ecological network that includes all known trophic and diverse non-trophic links among >100 coexisting species for the marine rocky intertidal community of the central Chilean coast. Our results suggest that non-trophic interactions exhibit highly nonrandom structures both alone and with respect to food web structure. The occurrence of different types of interactions, relative to all possible links, was well predicted by trophic structure and simple traits of the source and target species. In this community, competition for space and positive interactions related to habitat/refuge provisioning by sessile and/or basal species were by far the most abundant non-trophic interactions. If these patterns are orroborated in other ecosystems, they may suggest potentially important dynamic constraints on the combined architecture of trophic and non-trophic interactions. The nonrandom patterning of non-trophic interactions suggests a path forward for developing a more comprehensive ecological network theory to predict the functioning and resilience of ecological communities.

Scale, Environment, and Trophic Status: The Context Dependency of Community Saturation in Rocky Intertidal Communities

Our understanding of the relative influence of different ecological drivers on the number of species in a place remains limited. Assessing the relative influence of local ecological interactions versus regional species pools on local species richness should help bridge this conceptual gap. Plots of local species richness versus regional species pools have been used to address this question, yet after an active quarter‐century of research on the relative influence of local interactions versus regional species pools, consensus remains elusive. We propose a conceptual framework that incorporates spatial scale and ecological interaction strength to reconcile current disparities. We then test this framework using a survey of marine rocky intertidal algal and invertebrate communities from the northeast Pacific. We reach two main conclusions. First, these data show that the power of regional species pools to predict local richness disintegrates at small spatial scales coincident with the scale of biological interactions, when studying ecologically interactive groups of species, and in generally more abiotically stressful habitats (e.g., the high intertidal). Second, conclusions of past studies asserting that the regional species pool is the primary driver of local species richness may be artifacts of large spatial scales or ecologically noninteractive groups of species.

Spatial and temporal dynamics and value of nature-based recreation, estimated via social media

Conserved lands provide multiple ecosystem services, including opportunities for nature-based recreation. Managing this service requires understanding the landscape attributes underpinning its provision, and how changes in land management affect its contribution to human wellbeing over time. However, evidence from both spatially explicit and temporally dynamic analyses is scarce, often due to data limitations. In this study, we investigated nature-based recreation within conserved lands in Vermont, USA. We used geotagged photographs uploaded to the photo-sharing website Flickr to quantify visits by in-state and out-of-state visitors, and we multiplied visits by mean trip expenditures to show that conserved lands contributed US

Catching the right wave: evaluating wave energy resources and potential compatibility with existing marine and coastal uses.

1.8 billion (US

Forage species in predator diets: Synthesis of data from the California Current

0.18–20.2 at 95% confidence) to Vermont’s tourism industry between 2007 and 2014. We found eight landscape attributes explained the pattern of visits to conserved lands; visits were higher in larger conserved lands, with less forest cover, greater trail density and more opportunities for snow sports. Some of these attributes differed from those found in other locations, but all aligned with our understanding of recreation in Vermont. We also found that using temporally static models to inform conservation decisions may have perverse outcomes for nature-based recreation. For example, static models suggest conserved land with less forest cover receive more visits, but temporally dynamic models suggest clearing forests decreases, rather than increases, visits to these sites. Our results illustrate the importance of understanding both the spatial and temporal dynamics of ecosystem services for conservation decision-making.

Organismal traits are more important than environment for species interactions in the intertidal zone

Many hope that ocean waves will be a source for clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy, yet wave energy conversion facilities may affect marine ecosystems through a variety of mechanisms, including competition with other human uses. We developed a decision-support tool to assist siting wave energy facilities, which allows the user to balance the need for profitability of the facilities with the need to minimize conflicts with other ocean uses. Our wave energy model quantifies harvestable wave energy and evaluates the net present value (NPV) of a wave energy facility based on a capital investment analysis. The model has a flexible framework and can be easily applied to wave energy projects at local, regional, and global scales. We applied the model and compatibility analysis on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada to provide information for ongoing marine spatial planning, including potential wave energy projects. In particular, we conducted a spatial overlap analysis with a variety of existing uses and ecological characteristics, and a quantitative compatibility analysis with commercial fisheries data. We found that wave power and harvestable wave energy gradually increase offshore as wave conditions intensify. However, areas with high economic potential for wave energy facilities were closer to cable landing points because of the cost of bringing energy ashore and thus in nearshore areas that support a number of different human uses. We show that the maximum combined economic benefit from wave energy and other uses is likely to be realized if wave energy facilities are sited in areas that maximize wave energy NPV and minimize conflict with existing ocean uses. Our tools will help decision-makers explore alternative locations for wave energy facilities by mapping expected wave energy NPV and helping to identify sites that provide maximal returns yet avoid spatial competition with existing ocean uses.

Measuring recreational visitation at U.S. National Parks with crowd-sourced photographs

Characterization of the diets of upper-trophic pelagic predators that consume forage species is a key ingredient in the development of ecosystem-based fishery management plans, conservation of marine predators, and ecological and economic modeling of trophic interactions. Here we present the California Current Predator Diet Database (CCPDD) for the California Current region of the Pacific Ocean over the past century, assimilating over 190 published records of predator food habits for over 100 predator species and 32 categories of forage taxa (species or groups of similar species). Literature searches targeted all predators that consumed forage species: seabirds, cetaceans, pinnipeds, bony and cartilaginous fishes, and a predatory invertebrate. Diet data were compiled into a relational database. Analysis of the CCPDD highlighted differences in predator diet data availability based on geography, time period and predator taxonomy, as well as prominent prey categories. The top 5 forage taxa with the most predators included juvenile rockfish, northern anchovy, euphausiid krill, Pacific herring and market squid. Predator species with abundant data included Pacific hake, common murre, and California sea lion. Most diet data were collected during the summer; the lack of winter data will restrict future use of the CCPDD to understand seasonal patterns in predator diet unless more such data become available. Increased synthesis of historical information can provide new resources to understand patterns in the role of forage species in predator diet. Increased publication and/or accessibility of long-term datasets and data-sharing will further foster the synthesis of information intended to inform the management, conservation and understanding of marine food webs.