| Summary: | The current generation of scientists will be asked to mitigate climate change, stall biodiversity loss, and protect ecological communities. These are tasks that require a knowledge of both ecological and social systems to be undertaken successfully. Therefore, my dissertation spans the fields of community ecology and social sciences in an attempt to prepare to solve problems that are multidisciplinary by nature. My ecological research (Chapters 2-4) utilizes rocky intertidal ecosystems as a platform to study how oceanographic processes impact ecological communities. Intertidal communities, and the processes that maintain them, are strongly connected to large-scale oceanographic processes; previous research has highlighted the connection between large-scale processes and general patterns among sites. In Chapter 2, I examine how site level characteristics of community structure and recovery from disturbance predict patterns in previously uncharacterized cryptic surge channel communities. Using multivariate methods, I provided a novel quantitative description of cryptic surge channel communities and their patterns of recovery after disturbance. I quantified the relative importance of site and environmental factors on patterns of community composition, diversity, and recovery in these two communities. I found that site-level patterns in species dominance (e.g., macrophyte versus sessile invertebrate) predict patterns of community composition in cryptic communities. Furthermore, patterns of recovery and recovery rates were consistent with site-level patterns, suggesting that site-level processes are important across all habitat types within a site. This finding validates the previous assumption that large-scale oceanographic processes (e.g., upwelling, productivity, and recruitment) are closely linked to nearshore ecosystems and that this pattern is evident across distinct habitat types. Ocean acidification (OA), defined as the reduction in the pH of global oceans, is predicted to have negative impacts on marine ...
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