PARENT SESSION
Symposium 5: Marine macroecology
Organized by: JD Witman and K Roy
Tuesday, August 9, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 517 B, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Vertical and horizontal transport in the coastal oceans: Macroecological consequences of oceanographic forcing.
Leichter, James*,1, Witman, Jon2, 1 Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA2 Brown University, Providence, RI
ABSTRACT- Coastal marine ecosystems are influenced by a suite of dynamic physical mechanisms causing vertical and horizontal transport across a range of scales. These mechanisms range from coastal upwelling affecting coastlines on regional and seasonal scales, to meanders and eddies in alongshore currents occurring at scales of tens of kilometers and days, to the effects of internal waves acting at tidal and faster frequencies at scales of tens of meters to kilometers and minutes to hours. At present, both theory and controlled experiments to understand the ecological consequences of such broad-scale mechanisms and their potential interactions are largely limited. Here we review a range of mechanisms and consider specific examples of resulting macroecological effects. Vertical and horizontal transport mechanisms produce spatial and temporal patchiness of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, particulate nutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton. The consequences for macroecological patterns likely include effects on body size of suspension feeding invertebrates, abundance and diversity, dispersal, recruitment, population connectedness, and food web structure. In addition to influencing environmental patchiness at small scales, local physical transport mechanisms can be modulated by larger scale and climate processes with resulting synchrony of forcing at regional and possibly larger spatial scales.
Key words: vertical transport, oceanographic forcing