TY - JOUR
T1 - Emergent Spatial Patterns Can Indicate Upcoming Regime Shifts in a Realistic Model of Coral Community
AU - Génin, Alexandre
AU - Navarrete, Sergio A
AU - Garcia-Mayor, Angeles
AU - Wieters, Evie A
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for The American Society of Naturalists.
PY - 2024/2
Y1 - 2024/2
N2 - Increased stress on coastal ecosystems, such as coral reefs, seagrasses, kelp forests, and other habitats, can make them shift toward degraded, often algae-dominated or barren communities. This has already occurred in many places around the world, calling for new approaches to identify where such regime shifts may be triggered. Theoretical work predicts that the spatial structure of habitat-forming species should exhibit changes prior to regime shifts, such as an increase in spatial autocorrelation. However, extending this theory to marine systems requires theoretical models connecting field-supported ecological mechanisms to data and spatial patterns at relevant scales. To do so, we built a spatially explicit model of subtropical coral communities based on experiments and long-term datasets from Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), to test whether spatial indicators could signal upcoming regime shifts in coral communities. Spatial indicators anticipated degradation of coral communities following increases in frequency of bleaching events or coral mortality. However, they were generally unable to signal shifts that followed herbivore loss, a widespread and well-researched source of degradation, likely because herbivory, despite being critical for the maintenance of corals, had comparatively little effect on their selforganization. Informative trends were found under both equilibrium and nonequilibrium conditions but were determined by the type of direct neighbor interactions between corals, which remain relatively poorly documented. These inconsistencies show that while this approach is promising, its application to marine systems will require detailed information about the type of stressor and filling current gaps in our knowledge of interactions at play in coral communities.
AB - Increased stress on coastal ecosystems, such as coral reefs, seagrasses, kelp forests, and other habitats, can make them shift toward degraded, often algae-dominated or barren communities. This has already occurred in many places around the world, calling for new approaches to identify where such regime shifts may be triggered. Theoretical work predicts that the spatial structure of habitat-forming species should exhibit changes prior to regime shifts, such as an increase in spatial autocorrelation. However, extending this theory to marine systems requires theoretical models connecting field-supported ecological mechanisms to data and spatial patterns at relevant scales. To do so, we built a spatially explicit model of subtropical coral communities based on experiments and long-term datasets from Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), to test whether spatial indicators could signal upcoming regime shifts in coral communities. Spatial indicators anticipated degradation of coral communities following increases in frequency of bleaching events or coral mortality. However, they were generally unable to signal shifts that followed herbivore loss, a widespread and well-researched source of degradation, likely because herbivory, despite being critical for the maintenance of corals, had comparatively little effect on their selforganization. Informative trends were found under both equilibrium and nonequilibrium conditions but were determined by the type of direct neighbor interactions between corals, which remain relatively poorly documented. These inconsistencies show that while this approach is promising, its application to marine systems will require detailed information about the type of stressor and filling current gaps in our knowledge of interactions at play in coral communities.
KW - Animals
KW - Anthozoa
KW - Coral Reefs
KW - Ecosystem
KW - Fishes
KW - Forests
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85183814085&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1086/728117
DO - 10.1086/728117
M3 - Article
C2 - 38306282
SN - 0003-0147
VL - 203
SP - 204
EP - 218
JO - The American Naturalist
JF - The American Naturalist
IS - 2
ER -