Assessing multitrophic stability in an MPA network

Community stability and resilience are critical themes in ecology as the negative effects of climate change on ecological systems become more prevalent and detrimental. Consequently, understanding how environmental conditions contribute to ecological stability and how the effects of climate change might be reduced or made less impactful through management interventions is of critical importance.

This work explores how a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) implemented across a biogeographic gradient in environmental conditions in central California, USA influences the temporal stability of communities and metacommunities. We leverage an 11-year time series of community abundance with trophic information to understand how temporal stability is influenced by MPAs, environmental variation, and species synchrony. We decompose synchrony into consumptive and competitive interactions to better understand their relative influence on stability. The primary goal of this work was to explore how spatial gradients in environmental conditions and marine protection influence temporal stability across spatial scales.

The outcome of this detailed approach suggests that MPAs and environmental variation influence temporal stability in community abundance at different spatial scales and through different mechanisms. Additionally, by decomposing synchrony into the species interactions that either result from, or contribute to patterns of species synchrony and temporal stability, we provide a novel assessment of how species interactions contribute to community stability at the ecosystem scale.

Check it out in our new paper published in Conservation Biology!