OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Ecological communities on the Oregon coast are being subtly destabilized by the pressures of climate change despite giving an appearance of stress resistance, new research by Oregon State University shows.
The findings are important because assessing and understanding how plants, animals and other life forms respond to a warming planet is critical to human welfare, lead author Bruce Menge said.
The study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that ecological communities in Oregon’s rocky intertidal zone have grown less stable for at least a decade though their structure – the organisms that comprise them – has basically stayed the same.
The community destabilization arises from decreasing resilience – the ability to bounce back from disturbance. The findings suggest other ecological communities around the globe that project a look of stability actually wouldn’t appear that way upon close inspection of how their member organisms collectively react in the face of disruption.
“Climate change is threatening to destabilize ecological communities,” said Menge, a professor of integrative biology at OSU who has been conducting research on the coast for four decades. “A possibility is that they’ll stop being persistently occupied, what we call basins of attraction, and move into other states.”
Menge, postdoctoral researcher Sarah Gravem and colleagues in the College of Science looked at a total of six sites in three distinct regions of Oregon’s low intertidal zone from 2011 to 2019. The regions are Cape Perpetua on the central coast, Cape Foulweather to the north and Cape Blanco to the south.
At every site the scientists created five “disturbed plots,” each a half-meter square. Once a year those plots were cleared of all life forms big enough to be seen with the naked eye: limpets, mussels, sea anemones, barnacles, seagrass, sponges, snails, crabs, sea stars, etc.
The plots were photographed regularly and from those pictures, researchers could gauge the amount of taxa on each plot.
If the ecological communities surrounding the plots were stable, the plots would show steady recovery patterns following each clearing. That was not what happened, the researchers found.
Generally, the disturbances caused communities to move toward structures dominated by bare space and “weedier” taxa like barnacles and filamentous algae.
“And in all cases, over time the rates of recovery slowed and also became more variable,” Gravem said. “Increasing variation in key ecological processes can be a signal that an ecosystem is on the verge of a state shift. On the Oregon coast, the factors behind that increasing variation appear to be coming from changes in ocean currents and thermal disruptions like marine heat waves, which can alter growth, decrease colonization rates and kill organisms.”
The research doesn’t necessarily indicate that the iconic rocky regions of Oregon’s shoreline are nearing an ecological tipping point where sudden, often irreversible ecosystem changes happen, the scientists say. But the findings aren’t good news either, they say.
“On land, extreme wildfires illustrate how gradual changes in temperature or rainfall can eventually lead to catastrophic events,” Menge said. “In the ocean environment, novel occurrences like marine heatwaves and disease epidemics are the new and acute threats being added to the gradual increases in water temperature and ocean acidification commonly associated with climate change.”
The scientists say that although it’s difficult to predict exactly when a sudden ecosystem change will happen, systems nearing the brink of one may send out warning signals. Increasing variability of community structure is believed to be one of them, and another is the system recovering more and more slowly from small perturbations.
“Resilient systems can quickly bounce back to their original configurations after a disturbance,” Gravem said. “Rocky intertidal systems are highly dynamic but Oregon’s has begun to show signs of losing its resilience, likely in response to unprecedented stresses related to acute warming events. Even the intact communities we studied alongside the cleared plots became more variable, which we believe to be a harbinger of instability and an early warning sign for community state change.”
The National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Kingfisher Foundation and the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation supported this study.
Angela Johnson, Jonathan Robinson and Brittany Poirson of the OSU College of Science also participated in the research.
JOURNAL
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
Increasing Instability of a Rocky Intertidal Meta-Ecosystem
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
10-Jan-2022
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Twaddle!
I presume they have a comparative ecologically ‘stable’ site which they have subjected to the same conditions and which has reacted as they say these should?
Well of course not, the sites…………… ‘should have done this’ is just in their imagination, They dreamed it up. Might as well as said they should have produced enough food to feed the whole of Oregon!
They seem quite happy to humiliate themselves. The grants must be impressive.
” At every site the scientists created five “disturbed plots,” each a half-meter square … ”
What a realy nice, and representative, experimental setup!… (/s needed?)
This is equivalent to study the structure of a fortress by building a sandcastle in the beach and watch what happens…
I was furious about my Alma Mater (MSc Economic Geology) Oregon State University for poorly contrived pseudo research, and was going to comment, but I see the WATTS Regulars have beaten them about the head and shoulders sufficiently, so never mind.
Didn’t Marcott, of scientific fraud fame, come from OSU? Oh, and his PhD advisor that collaborated on the scientific misconduct in the subsequent paper?
Yes, there is an OSU connection.
See the following: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
Bill, Roger Pielke, Jr.’s writeup is is of minimal concern compared to the scientific fraud revealed by Steve McIntyre and in Rud Istvan’s “Blowing Smoke.” For example, of the total of 73 total proxy records identically used in both Marcott’s thesis and the subsequent NSF-funded Science study, Steve reviewed the 31 alkenone series he had previously audited. Of those 31 proxy series, 3 records were “pulled back” in time to get rid of their downward trends post 1900. Additionally, 4 records were “pulled forward” in time to place their up-ticking endpoints in the post 1900 window.
Rud showed that of the 73 proxies, a total of 9 were “pulled back” and 10 “pulled forward.” In one example, the data range was moved by over 1,000 years. In another, the range was moved over 500 years.
This issue alone is “smoking gun” evidence of scientific fraud on the part of Marcott and his OSU thesis advisor and subsequent study co-author. Nothing was done, however, by OSU, NSA Federal funding agency nor the publisher, Science..
Dave Fair
Thank you for the additional information. So, 20-25% of the proxies were altered in a systematic manner. That would create a false (fraudulent) trend in many data sets.
B Rocks
I am doing a learned study on the emergence of parasitic ecosystems around gravy trains.
https://joannenova.com.au/2022/01/stop-that-now-climate-change-helps-aggressive-mangrove-forests-build-bigger-tropical-islands/
Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.
Dramatic, islands are growing…..
This reads like a high school science project. Field plot research design is extremely challenging in a multi variate and highly non homogeneous system. As described, their experimental design appears weak at best, and there is no mention of their predetermined statistical design used to test their hypothesis, which is never clearly stated, only inferred. Nothing was said of environmental measurements.I can’t imagine one can learn much from a handful of short-term “plots” about the size of my feet. Apparently, the bar is set very low for dissertation research these days at Oregon State, but the student and her professor didn’t hesitate to wax philosophic as they grossly extrapolated their vague findings to planetary-scale predictions. Just more climate porn.
Amazing that this obscure and sloppy bit of research even sees the light of day beyond her doctoral committee.
By someone who took 8 years to graduate.
Things are changing – always have and always will, research shows.
Pure, unadulterated, pseudoscientific garbage. They have these “experimental forrests”, the most famous being Hubbard Brook, where they do these sorts of “experiments”. They even created “ice storms” between 2015 and 2017, to see how damaging they are, the “understanding” being that due to “climate change”, we will be seeing more damaging ice storms more often. One weeps for what science has become.
Don’t forget the beach parties.
I live in Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast. I follow the water temperature here closely as it affects fishing, crabbing, clamming. The thing is, that temperature is 54 degrees year round, it never varies. Since I am on the beach and checking rocks for mussels (pretty tasty, with a red wine sauce) a lot I have noticed absolutely no change. And when I was in Mexico living on my sailboat in the Sea of Cortez, the water temp went from 69 to 85 degrees in a single year. That didn’t have much of any effect either.
And remember the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska? The coastline has all come back with the exception of areas where they pressure washed the rocks.
I think I am too practical to believe all these theories that never seem to come true.
As an Oregonian I am embarrassed by this. OSU is a joke. It’s a factory churning out the newest models of “woke” “liberals” and they have done little during the covid debacle save more of the same “science” you see here.
I’m glad to see so many folks here easily shooting down this garbage.
Sadly most Oregonians, even the right-wing will likely gobble this up and never doubt it for a second. Then for the rest of time, this total farce of a “study” becomes “fact” and then those of us who dissent from its erroneous findings will be labeled with an epithet to denounce our viewpoints.
It’s incredibly telling that they announce other “climate change” effects on land regarding wildfires, as if the forest 200 miles inland and the intertidal zone have the exact same ecological “rules” as each other. Thus meaning “climate change” always effects both, no matter what.
You can spot the liars by merely asking a hard question. When the response is not information but rather anger, you’ve got a liar on your hands.
Ask OSU what variables they controlled for. The answer will be not the information you request but rather vitriol, slander, accusations, straw man attacks, obfuscations, and blatant lies.
This “science” is not questionable, it’s Gospel, and so it’s just an opinion. These people want there to be climate effects on the coast, so that’s what they “found.”
Please write to these people and explain how poorly they did this study. Please.
“subtly destabilized by the pressures of climate change despite giving an appearance of stress resistance”
Meaning we can’t see that there is a change and we can’t prove there is but we know it is there.
We cannot find proof of stress but we know it must be there, so it is there, just hidden. Sneaky bugger that Gaia
According to data there has been no increase in temps in the continental usa over the long term, so whatever stuff they choose to make up about the rest of the world with poor temperature records, there does not appear to be an issue in the US of A?
Oregon State University says ecosystems destabilized by climate change.
Who says ‘ecosystems’ should be stable ?
Sounds like more trash if you ask me . .
This article reminds me of just how much I miss actual science!
For those who missed it below, Menge is Jane Lubchenco’s husband.
That’s highly germane. Among other things.
BULLOCKS!!! The simple explanation is that whatever steps they did to obliterate visible life int he plots each year was having a cumulative negative impact on the ability of life to return. How can they be so obtuse?