ALBERT

Description: The results are discussed of a geophysical survey undertaken by R.R.S. Discovery II early in 1962 in an area centred on 29° 15'N, 25° 5'W at the western extremity of the Madeira-Cape Verde Abyssal Plain. Seismic investigations show that the sediments are underlain by an intermediate layer about 2 km in thickness of velocity 4.1-5.4 km/sec which overlies a deep layer 5.2-km thick of velocity 6.3-6.8 km/sec. Refracted arrivals on the longest seismic line give a depth of 13.2 km to the M discontinuity. Magnetic results indicate that the topography of the abyssal hills in the western part of the area is probably continued eastwards as sub-bottom relief beneath the sediments of the abyssal plain. They also support the hypothesis that the intermediate seismic layer (layer 2) is composed predominantly of volcanic rocks. Examination of a well-defined magnetic anomaly over one topographic feature ("The Madcap Volcano") shows it to be composed of magnetized rocks (I = 8.4 × 10**-3 e.m.u./cm**3) having a direction of magnetization which points upwards at 25° with an azimuth of 305°. Measurements at ten heat flow stations show that the average geothermal flux in this region is 1.20 (±0.11) µcal/cm**2/sec.

Description: A total of 36 coring stations were worked during the cruise of which twenty-five were successful. Both piston and free-fall gravity coring techniques were employed and the cores were extruded and rough logged on board ship as soon as they had been taken. Twelve dredge stations were occupied on the cruise, all of them lying in the Peake Deep area, and nine were successful.

Description: Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 2000

Description: The distribution of organisms in space has important consequences for the function and structure of ecological systems. Such distributions are often referred to as patchy, and a patch-based approach to modeling ecosystem dynamics has become a major research focus. These models have been used to explore a wide range of questions concerning population, metapopulation, community, and landscape ecology, in both terrestrial and aquatic systems. In this dissertation I develop and analyze a series of spatial models to study the dynamics of metapopulations and marine benthic communities in patchy environments. All the models have the form of a discrete-time Markov chain, and assume that the landscape is composed of discrete patches, each of which is in one of a number of possible states. The state of a patch is determined by the presence of an individual of a given species, a local population, or a group of species, depending on the spatial scale of the model. The research is organized into two main parts as follows. In the first part, I present an analysis of the effects of habitat destruction on metapopulation persistence. Theoretical studies have already shown that a metapopulation goes extinct when the fraction of suitable patches in the landscape falls below a critical threshold (the so called extinction threshold). This result has become a paradigm in conservation biology and several models have been developed to calculate extinction thresholds for endangered species. These models, however, generally do not take into account the spatial arrangement of habitat destruction, or the actual size of the landscape. To investigate how the spatial structure of habitat destruction affects persistence, I compare the behavior of two models: a spatially implicit patch-occupancy model (which recreates the extinction patterns found in other models) and a spatially explicit cellular automaton (CA) model. In the CA, I use fractal arrangements of suitable and unsuitable patches to simulate habitat destruction and show that the extinction threshold depends on the fractal dimension of the landscape. To investigate how habitat destruction affects persistence in finite landscapes , I develop and analyze a chain-binomial metapopulation (CBM) model. This model predicts the expected extinction time of a metapopulation as a function of the number of patches in the landscape and the number of those patches that are suitable for the population. The CBM model shows that the expected time to extinction decreases greater than exponentially as suitable patches are destroyed. I also describe a statistical method for estimating parameters for the CBM model in order to evaluate metapopulation viability in real landscapes. In the second part, I develop and analyze a series of Markov chain models for a rocky subtidal community in the Gulf of Maine. Data for the model comes from ten permanent quadrats (located on Ammen Rock Pinnacle at 30 meters depth) monitored over an 8-year period (1986-1994). I first parameterize a linear (homogenous) Markov chain model from the data set and analyze it using an array of novel techniques, including a compression algorithm to classify species into functional groups, a set of measures from stochastic process theory to characterize successional patterns, sensitivity analyses to predict how changes in various ecological processes effect community composition, and a method for simulating species removal to identify keystone species. I then explore the effects of time and space on successional patterns using log-linear analysis, and show that transition probabilities vary significantly across small spatial scales and over yearly time intervals. I examine the implications of these findings for predicting equilibrium species abundances and for characterizing the transient dynamics of the community. Finally, I develop a nonlinear Markov chain for the rocky subtidal community. The model is parameterized using maximum likelihood methods to estimate density-dependent transition probabilities. I analyze the best fitting models to study the effects of nonlinear species interactions on community dynamics, and to identify multiple stable states in the subtidal system.

Description: This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation through the following grants to Hal Caswell: ONR-URIP Grant NOOOl492- J-1527, NSF Grants DEB-9119420, DEB-95-27400, OCE-981267 and OCE-9302238.

Description: Author Posting. © University of Chicago Press, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of University of Chicago Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in American Naturalist 164 (2004): E46-E61.

Description: We present a Markov chain model of succession in a rocky subtidal community based on a long-term (1986–1994) study of subtidal invertebrates (14 species) at Ammen Rock Pinnacle in the Gulf of Maine. The model describes successional processes (disturbance, colonization, species persistence, and replacement), the equilibrium (stationary) community, and the rate of convergence. We described successional dynamics by species turnover rates, recurrence times, and the entropy of the transition matrix. We used perturbation analysis to quantify the response of diversity to successional rates and species removals. The equilibrium community was dominated by an encrusting sponge (Hymedesmia) and a bryozoan (Crisia eburnea). The equilibrium structure explained 98% of the variance in observed species frequencies. Dominant species have low probabilities of disturbance and high rates of colonization and persistence. On average, species turn over every 3.4 years. Recurrence times varied among species (7–268 years); rare species had the longest recurrence times. The community converged to equilibrium quickly (9.5 years), as measured by Dobrushin’s coefficient of ergodicity. The largest changes in evenness would result from removal of the dominant sponge Hymedesmia. Subdominant species appear to increase evenness by slowing the dominance of Hymedesmia. Comparison of the subtidal community with intertidal and coral reef communities revealed that disturbance rates are an order of magnitude higher in coral reef than in rocky intertidal and subtidal communities. Colonization rates and turnover times, however, are lowest and longest in coral reefs, highest and shortest in intertidal communities, and intermediate in subtidal communities.

Description: This research was supported by National Science Foundation grants DEB-9527400, OCE-981267, OCE-9302238, and OCE-0083976 and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Undersea Research Program, University of Connecticut—Avery Point.