Timing anthropogenic stressors to mitigate their impact on marine ecosystem resilience

Paul Pao-Yen Wu (), Kerrie Mengersen, Kathryn McMahon, Gary A. Kendrick, Kathryn Chartrand, Paul H. York, Michael A. Rasheed and M. Julian Caley
Additional contact information
Paul Pao-Yen Wu: University of Melbourne
Kerrie Mengersen: University of Melbourne
Kathryn McMahon: School of Sciences and Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research, Edith Cowan University
Gary A. Kendrick: WAMSI Headquarters, M095, University of Western Australia
Kathryn Chartrand: Centre for Tropical Water & Aquatic Ecosystem Research, James Cook University
Paul H. York: Centre for Tropical Water & Aquatic Ecosystem Research, James Cook University
Michael A. Rasheed: Centre for Tropical Water & Aquatic Ecosystem Research, James Cook University
M. Julian Caley: University of Melbourne

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Better mitigation of anthropogenic stressors on marine ecosystems is urgently needed to address increasing biodiversity losses worldwide. We explore opportunities for stressor mitigation using whole-of-systems modelling of ecological resilience, accounting for complex interactions between stressors, their timing and duration, background environmental conditions and biological processes. We then search for ecological windows, times when stressors minimally impact ecological resilience, defined here as risk, recovery and resistance. We show for 28 globally distributed seagrass meadows that stressor scheduling that exploits ecological windows for dredging campaigns can achieve up to a fourfold reduction in recovery time and 35% reduction in extinction risk. Although the timing and length of windows vary among sites to some degree, global trends indicate favourable windows in autumn and winter. Our results demonstrate that resilience is dynamic with respect to space, time and stressors, varying most strongly with: (i) the life history of the seagrass genus and (ii) the duration and timing of the impacting stress.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01306-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-01306-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01306-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().