Enduring a Major Marine Heatwave: The Role of Local Cool Refugia and Kelp Forests in the Resilience of Marine Invertebrates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Aim Ecological “bright spots” remain resilient following climate events such as marine heatwaves. One explanation for resilience is that small‐scale variability in ocean temperature sustains cooler areas that emerge as local bright spots. In cases where foundational species like kelp thrive through marine heatwaves, the species that rely on kelp for habitat and food also benefit. Here, we test the effect of temperature and habitat loss across both space and time on marine invertebrate communities. Location The Channel Islands National Park in Southern California. Methods We use 25 years (1995–2019) of the National Park Service Kelp Forest Monitoring program surveys, focusing on permanent transects at 16 sites (including some within marine protected areas) that recorded the abundance of 30 kelp forest invertebrates, and include two major marine heatwave events (1997–1998 El Niño event and 2014–2016 combined “Blob” and El Niño event). We examine the effect of local in situ temperature and kelp cover on local diversity and drivers of abrupt diversity changes within the invertebrate communities. Results Sites with more kelp cover and lower local temperatures supported more even invertebrate communities. Additionally, we show evidence of a major state shift within the invertebrate communities during the “Blob” event where local ocean temperatures at surveyed sites better predicted the presence of species density shifts than kelp cover did. Cooler sites underwent more abrupt changes in invertebrate abundance, with these changes resulting in increases of warm‐affinity urchin species that prevented kelp recovery after the “Blob” resided. Main Conclusions We show that changes in kelp forest communities did not occur gradually, but through abrupt invertebrate abundance shifts even in protected areas. Contrary to expectations, we found some species benefitted from marine heatwaves, highlighting the importance of examining species‐specific responses in improving our understanding of how communities respond to environmental changes and marine heatwaves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".