NSFGEO-NERC: Linking species traits to marine ecosystem functioning

Humans are modifying the diversity of life on Earth, changing the number and composition of species in ecosystems. It is essential to understand how these changes will affect how natural systems function. This project evaluates a promising method for predicting the impacts of biodiversity change by linking species' physical characteristics - their shapes and forms - to the key roles that they play in communities and ecosystems. These links between traits and emergent roles are poorly described, especially in coastal marine environments. This project involves screening the traits of seaweed species along gradients in environmental conditions on rocky shorelines - tide height, exposure to heavy surf, and latitude - along the U.S. West Coast and (via a partnership with the Natural Environment Research Council in the United Kingdom) the coast of Europe. This project includes experiments and outreach in regions with substantial exposure to the public, and the investigators will work with community, university, and museum outreach personnel to communicate this research to broader audiences. The project includes mechanisms for curriculum development and outreach and trains undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in marine science. The project also supports a visual arts exhibit for public display that illustrates the loss of seaweed species.

The investigators are using a suite of innovative approaches to understand the links between functional traits and emergent functional attributes of seaweeds, providing an unprecedented dataset linking seaweed morphology, physiology, and ecology: (i) characterizing the functional structure of seaweed communities and how that structure changes across environmental gradients, (ii) evaluating how that suite of easily measured traits is related to physiological and ecological processes, (iii) measuring species and traits at multiple sites along U.S. and European coastlines spanning gradients in latitude, wave exposure, and tidal elevation, and (iv) evaluating changes in functional redundancy along these gradients to quantify vulnerability of community interactions and ecosystem functioning to species loss These methods and approaches facilitate exploration of relationships between algal form and function and provide insights into the functional consequences of changes in seaweed diversity, with the potential to transform understanding of marine biodiversity across levels of biological organization. These advances in linking seaweeds' functional traits, functional groups, and roles in community- and ecosystem-level processes enhance prediction of the impacts of changing biodiversity - especially along environmental gradients and species ranges - and serve as a template for a mechanistic understanding of the roles of species in communities and ecosystems.