Terrie Klinger

Marine Ecosystem-based Management in Practice: Scientific and Governance Challenges

ABSTRACT Ecosystem-based management (EBM) in the ocean is a relatively new approach, and existing applications are evolving from more traditional management of portions of ecosystems. Because comprehensive examples of EBM in the marine environment do not yet exist, we first summarize EBM principles that emerge from the fisheries and marine social and ecological literature. We then apply those principles to four cases in which large parts of marine ecosystems are being managed, and ask how including additional components of an EBM approach might improve the prospects for those ecosystems. The case studies provide examples of how additional elements of EBM approaches, if applied, could improve ecosystem function. In particular, two promising next steps for applying EBM are to identify management objectives for the ecosystem, including natural and human goals, and to ensure that the governance structure matches with the scale over which ecosystem elements are measured and managed.

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN UV RADIATION AND TEMPERATURE LIMIT INFERENCES FROM SINGLE‐FACTOR EXPERIMENTS1

The global environment is changing. Substantial shifts in temperature, rainfall, cloud cover, and UV radiation (UVR) are all predicted as a result of anthropogenic activity. Although the actual and potential effects of changes in single environmental variables are being studied intensively, the interactive effects of multiple stressors have received little attention. Here we offer the first experimental evidence of interactive effects between UVR and temperature on germination and growth in multicellular organisms. To address the question of how temperature affects survival and growth of organisms in the presence of UVR, we exposed early life stages of two species of intertidal algae, Alaria marginata Postels et Ruprecht and Fucus gardneri Silva, to four levels of UVR at three temperatures for 56 h. PAR and day length (12:12‐h light:dark) were held constant across all treatments. UVR levels bracketed natural levels, and temperatures were within the range of ambient temperatures. Designated endpoints were germination rate and cell number, and we recorded mortality where survival was nil. Our results support the hypothesis that temperature mediates the net biological effect of UVR and vice versa. For instance, spores of A. marginata were able to survive and grow at 15° C at all UV levels and at 10° C in the absence of UVR but were unable to survive at 10° C in the presence of high levels of UVR. Our results suggest that the ability to predict the effects of global change hinges on understanding interactions among environmental variables, imposing strict limits on inferences made from single‐factor experiments.

Engineered Genes in Wild Populations: Fitness of Weed‐Crop Hybrids of Raphanus Sativus

The transfer of engineered genes (transgenes) from crops to natural popu- lations will depend first on mating between the crop and related weeds and then upon the relative fitness of the weed-crop hybrid. While weed-crop hybridization is known to occur readily under agricultural conditions, almost nothing is known of the fitness of the hybrids produced. Therefore, we measured the relative fitness of weedy radishes and their sibling weed-crop hybrids under field conditions. Specifically, we compared germination success, time to first flowering, fruit production, seed production, and frequency of transmission of the crop allele to seed progeny. Hybrids showed significantly greater fruit and seed production, and equaled weeds in all other measured characters. Thus, in this experiment, the fitness of hybrids exceeded that of their wild siblings. These results suggest that, in at least this system, neutral or advantageous transgenes introduced into natural populations will tend to persist.

Obstacles to Bottom‐Up Implementation of Marine Ecosystem Management

Ecosystem management (EM) offers a means to address multiple threats to marine resources. Despite recognition of the importance of stakeholder involvement, most efforts to implement EM in marine systems are the product of top-down regulatory control. We describe a rare, stakeholder-driven attempt to implement EM from the bottom up in San Juan County, Washington (U.S.A.). A citizens advisory group led a 2-year, highly participatory effort to develop an ecosystem-based management plan, guided by a preexisting conservation-planning framework. A key innovation was to incorporate social dimensions by designating both sociocultural and biodiversity targets in the planning process. Multiple obstacles hindered implementation of EM in this setting. Despite using a surrogate scheme, the information-related transaction costs of planning were substantial: information deficits prevented assessment of some biodiversity targets and insufficient resources combined with information deficits prevented scientific assessment of the sociocultural targets. Substantial uncertainty, practical constraints to stakeholder involvement, and the existence of multiple, potentially conflicting, objectives increased negotiation-related costs. Although information deficits and uncertainty, coupled with underinvestment in the transaction costs of planning, could reduce the long-term effectiveness of the plan itself, the social capital and momentum developed through the planning process could yield unforeseeable future gains in protection of marine resources. The obstacles we identified here will require early and sustained attention in efforts to implement ecosystem management in other grassroots settings.

The persistence of haplodiploidy in algae

Haplodiploid life cycles are especially well represented among the eukaryotic algae. The widespread retention of haplodiploidy among diverse algal groups provides us with the opportunity to consider haplodiploidy as a stable rather than transitional life history trait and to speculate on the selective mechanisms that could be responsible for its persistence. In doing so, we could gain added insights into the evolution of sex itself.

Modeling Passive Dispersal through a Large Estuarine System to Evaluate Marine Reserve Network Connections

The importance of larval dispersal to the performance of marine reserve networks is widely recognized. We characterized patterns of passive dispersal in the eastern basin of the Strait of Juan, de Fuca, Washington, and interpreted the results in the context of marine reserve network connectivity. We used a surface current model to describe the dispersal of passive particles released from 16 sites over periods of 4 and 30 d in the spring of three consecutive years. We then used this approximation to infer the extent to which existing marine reseves and protected areas established on an ad hoc basis are likely to function as a network connected via larval exchange. Dispersal patterns varied substantially between release sites. Release site location accounted for the greatest amount of variation in dispersal distance, exceeding variation due to year, month, or tidal phase. After 30 d, dispersal distance and variance combined to describe three groups of release sites: those characterized by short distance, low variance dispersal; those characterized by long distance, low variance dispersal; and those characterized by intermediate to long distance, high variance dispersal. We suggest that sites within this third group are likely to make the strongest contributions to network connectivity in this system. Our findings underscore the importance of using both dispersal distance and variance estimates to model connectivity between sites and suggest that the performance of ad hoc collections of protected sites can be enhanced through the establishment of additional protected sites chosen to fill critical gaps in existing networks.

Narratives Can Motivate Environmental Action: The Whiskey Creek Ocean Acidification Story

Even when environmental data quantify the risks and benefits of delayed responses to rapid anthropogenic change, institutions rarely respond promptly. We propose that narratives complementing environmental datasets can motivate responsive environmental policy. To explore this idea, we relate a case study in which a narrative of economic loss due to regionally rapid ocean acidification—an anthropogenic change—helped connect knowledge with action. We pose three hypotheses to explain why narratives might be particularly effective in linking science to environmental policy, drawing from the literature of economics, environmental policy, and cognitive psychology. It seems that yet-untold narratives may hold similar potential for strengthening the feedback between environmental data and policy and motivating regional responses to other environmental problems.

A systematic review of ecological attributes that confer resilience to climate change in environmental restoration

Ecological restoration is widely practiced as a means of rehabilitating ecosystems and habitats that have been degraded or impaired through human use or other causes. Restoration practices now are confronted by climate change, which has the potential to influence long-term restoration outcomes. Concepts and attributes from the resilience literature can help improve restoration and monitoring efforts under changing climate conditions. We systematically examined the published literature on ecological resilience to identify biological, chemical, and physical attributes that confer resilience to climate change. We identified 45 attributes explicitly related to climate change and classified them as individual- (9), population- (6), community- (7), ecosystem- (7), or process-level attributes (16). Individual studies defined resilience as resistance to change or recovery from disturbance, and only a few studies explicitly included both concepts in their definition of resilience. We found that individual and population attributes generally are suited to species- or habitat-specific restoration actions and applicable at the population scale. Community attributes are better suited to habitat-specific restoration at the site scale, or system-wide restoration at the ecosystem scale. Ecosystem and process attributes vary considerably in their type and applicability. We summarize these relationships in a decision support table and provide three example applications to illustrate how these classifications can be used to prioritize climate change resilience attributes for specific restoration actions. We suggest that (1) including resilience as an explicit planning objective could increase the success of restoration projects, (2) considering the ecological context and focal scale of a restoration action is essential in choosing appropriate resilience attributes, and (3) certain ecological attributes, such as diversity and connectivity, are more commonly considered to confer resilience because they apply to a wide variety of species and ecosystems. We propose that identifying sources of ecological resilience is a critical step in restoring ecosystems in a changing climate.

Preliminary observations on the development of kelp gametophytes endophytic in red algae

The development of kelp gametophytes is described from field collections from the San Juan Islands, Washington from November, 1997 to March 1998. All gametophytes were endophytic in the cell walls of red algae, especially species with filamentous or polysiphonous construction. Gametophyte density ranged from a few to many hundreds of distinct individuals per host plant. Gametophytes formed extensive vegetative growths of irregularly branching filaments, mostly parallel to the host surface, consisting of up to 50 or more cells. Antheridia were formed at/or just above the surface of the host thallus. The stalked egg apparatus was perpendicular to the host surface. Following presumed fertilization, the zygotes developed with typical kelp embryology to form small epiphytic blades. The specific identity of the gametophytes is unknown, although the host plants were collected from three sites where the dominant kelp species were: a) Agarum fimbriatum, b) Nereocystis luetkeana and c) Alaria marginata, Costaria costata and Laminaria groenlandica.

Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science

Peer-reviewed publications focusing on climate change are growing exponentially with the consequence that the uptake and influence of individual papers varies greatly. Here, we derive metrics of narrativity from psychology and literary theory, and use these metrics to test the hypothesis that more narrative climate change writing is more likely to be influential, using citation frequency as a proxy for influence. From a sample of 732 scientific abstracts drawn from the climate change literature, we find that articles with more narrative abstracts are cited more often. This effect is closely associated with journal identity: higher-impact journals tend to feature more narrative articles, and these articles tend to be cited more often. These results suggest that writing in a more narrative style increases the uptake and influence of articles in climate literature, and perhaps in scientific literature more broadly.