In-situ sustained monitoring and eDNA techniques for determining responses of intertidal species to environmental change

Key words: Environmental change, marine ecology, eDNA, intertidal, global change, climate change, species distributions
Abstract: Climate change is the biggest threat to global security, human health, and biodiversity. It is affecting marine ecosystems through pervasive changes in climatic conditions and climate variability, increased frequency of extreme events and sea level rise. There is a need to understand the ecological dynamics of climate change impacts to identify hotspots of vulnerability and resilience and to identify management interventions that may assist biosphere resilience to climate change. Sustained observations monitoring can track and quantify changes, and is critical for predicting future changes, however, visual surveys do not always record all species present, especially rare or cryptic species. This will test whether the match between thermal affinity and thermal habitat differs between species with different life histories and habitat preferences. The project will use global databases, high quality data from UK surveys, and new data generated using eDNA techniques.
Climate change is causing unprecedented responses in marine communities. Spatial and
temporal trends are difficult to quantify, however, due to the lack of long-term datasets and the occurrence of small-scale variability from natural and anthropogenic drivers. Understanding these changes requires a multidisciplinary approach combining patterns identified within long-term datasets and the processes driving those patterns using biologically relevant information to attribute cause and effect. Intertidal species are early indicators of climate change impacts, with biogeographic range shifts of up to 10km per decade, some of the fastest in any natural system. Range boundaries of many species occur around the UK coastline, which bisects the boundary between the cooler Boreal and warmer Lusitanian provinces, with implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. The PhD project will combine macroecology, physiology and molecular techniques to address the question of how fast is climate-driven range expansion occurring in UK intertidal habitats?

The PhD will use the MarClim time-series, which is the most spatio-temporally extensive time-series for intertidal systems in the world. Sustained observations of rocky intertidal species date back to the 1950s have shown some of the fastest shifts in abundance and distribution of species in any natural system. This dataset includes 87 species of invertebrate and macroalgae of boreal, lusitanian and invasive origins. The PhD will also incorporate environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis to test for early detection of northwards range spread and identification of species presence at planktonic life stages. This PhD will take a state-of-the-art, integrated perspective on how ecosystems respond to climate change, how ecosystem resilience can be enhanced and how ecosystems can assist in addressing the challenge of a changing climate. The project will link this observational dataset with eDNA techniques and statistical modelling to assess the spatial and temporal extent of environmental change on species' distributions in intertidal habitats.