Publication Date:
2022-10-20
Description:
© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Bell, T. W., & Siegel, D. A. Nutrient availability and senescence spatially structure the dynamics of a foundation species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(1), (2021): e2105135118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105135118.
Description:
Disentangling the roles of the external environment and internal biotic drivers of plant population dynamics is challenging due to the absence of relevant physiological and abundance information over appropriate space and time scales. Remote observations of giant kelp biomass and photosynthetic pigment concentrations are used to show that spatiotemporal patterns of physiological condition, and thus growth and production, are regulated by different processes depending on the scale of observation. Nutrient supply was linked to regional scale (〉1 km) physiological condition dynamics, and kelp forest stands were more persistent where nutrient levels were consistently high. However, on local scales (〈1 km), internal senescence processes related to canopy age demographics determined patterns of biomass loss across individual kelp forests despite uniform nutrient conditions. Repeat measurements of physiology over continuous spatial fields can provide insights into complex dynamics that are unexplained by the environmental drivers thought to regulate abundance. Emerging remote sensing technologies that provide simultaneous estimates of abundance and physiology can quantify the roles of environmental change and demographics governing plant population dynamics for a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
Description:
This work was supported by the US NSF (Grants OCE 1232779 and 1831937), by the US Department of Energy (Cooperative Agreement DE-AR0000922), and by NASA (Grant NNX14AR62A) and the NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship program in support of T.W.B.
Keywords:
Physiology
;
Population
;
Biomass
;
Hyperspectral
;
Giant kelp
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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