Megafauna in Salt Marshes

Gaskins, Leo C.; Paxton, Avery B.; Silliman, Brian R.

doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.561476

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…2002, Gaskins et al. 2020). In fact, ecosystems where rewilding or reintroduction of large consumers has occurred can experience reduction of invasive plant species or orders of magnitude increases in primary productivity (Estes and Palmisano 1974, Cowlishaw 1997, Guyton et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Feral hogs control brackish marsh plant communities over time

Silliman

Hensel

Byrnes

2021

Ecology

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Feral hogs modify ecosystems by consuming native species and altering habitat structure. These invasions can generate fundamentally different post‐invasion habitats when disturbance changes community structure, ecosystem function, or recovery dynamics. Here, we use multiple three‐year exclusion experiments to describe how feral hogs affect hyper‐productive brackish marshes over time. We find that infrequent yet consistent hog foraging and trampling suppresses dominant plants by generating a perpetually disturbed habitat that favors competitively inferior species and disallows full vegetative recovery over time. Along borders between plant monocultures, trampling destroys dominant graminoids responsible for most aboveground marsh biomass while competitively inferior plants increase fivefold. Hog activities shift the brackish marsh disturbance regime from pulse to press, which changes the plant community: competitively inferior plants increase coverage, species diversity is doubled, and live cover is lowered by 30% as large plants are unable to take hold in hog‐disturbed areas. Release from disturbance does not result in complete recovery (i.e., dominant plant monocultures) because hog consumer control is a combination of both top‐down control and broader engineering effects. These results highlight how habitats are susceptible to invasive effects outside of structural destruction alone, especially if large consumers are pervasive over time and change the dynamics that sustain recovery.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Feral hogs are now included with sea otters and American alligators as large organisms that can have strong, pervasive effects on marshes that expand over time based on animal behavior (Gaskins et al. 2020). Recent research indicates that feral hog effects are also relevant in many coastal ecosystems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feral hogs control brackish marsh plant communities over time

Silliman

Hensel

Byrnes

2021

Ecology

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“…The passive transport of carbon is primarily driven by tidal forcing and winds, and it is exchanged in multiple forms including dissolved organic and inorganic carbon (DOC/DIC), particulate organic carbon (POC), floating wrack and drifting algae (Arroyo & Bonsdorff, 2016; Hartmann, 1983; Huxham et al, 2018; Odum, 2002). The active transport and exchange of carbon across BCE borders is facilitated by mobile consumers, such as nekton, sea birds and terrestrial reptiles and mammals (Gaskins et al, 2020; Hyndes et al, 2014; Moss, 2017; Figure 2). Due to the vast numbers of nekton supported by the coastal seascape, this group of consumers appears to play a particularly important role in the active, biota‐mediated transfer of blue carbon (Irlandi & Crawford, 1997; Moss, 2017).…”

Section: Part I—a Conceptual Framework Of Biotic‐interaction Effects ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Biota‐mediated carbon cycling—A synthesis of biotic‐interaction controls on blue carbon

et al. 2022

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Biota play an obvious key role in terrestrial and aquatic carbon cycling (Schlesinger & Bernhardt, 2013). Biotamediated carbon cycling is the consequence of basic physiological functions and refers to the transformation of CO 2 into organic matter (OM) through assimilation by primary producers (including plants, algae and autotrophic prokaryotes) and the release of CO 2 (or CH 4 ) through dissimilatory processes such as respiration by consumers (predominantly animals), microbial decomposers (including fungi, bacteria and archaea) and primary producers (Hügler & Sievert, 2011;Rosenberg et al., 2014;Thauer et al., 2008). Besides these direct biota-mediated effects on carbon cycling, biotic interactions between producers, consumers and decomposers can induce important changes in the rate of assimilatory and dissimilatory processes and thereby exert indirect

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“…On the one hand, some of the abiotic factors, especially the hydrodynamic ones, could be included rather easily in the model, for example by weighting the habitat quality based on stresses calculated from hydrodynamic models or, alternatively, as a function of the distance of each site from marsh edges exposed to the action of waves and currents (see for example Gourgue et al, 2021a;Kalra et al, 2021). On the other hand, however, most of the biotic factors affecting vegetation dynamics are difficult to conceptualize, as they depend on the community ecology of marsh fauna (Gaskins et al, 2020;Burdick et al, 2021;Pennings and He, 2021).…”

Section: Model Limitations and Future Developmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Minimalist Model of Salt-Marsh Vegetation Dynamics Driven by Species Competition and Dispersal

et al. 2022

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We present a new bidimensional, spatially-explicit ecological model describing the dynamics of halophytic vegetation in tidal saline wetlands. Existing vegetation models employ relatively simple deterministic or stochastic mechanisms, and are driven by local environmental conditions. In the proposed model, in contrast, vegetation dynamics depend not only on the marsh local habitat, but also on spatially-explicit mechanisms of dispersal and competition among multiple interacting species. The role of habitat quality, here determined by the local elevation relative to the mean sea level as a proxy for environmental conditions, is mathematically modeled by a logistic function that represents the fundamental (theoretical) niche of each halophytic species. Hence, the model does not artificially impose any constraints to the ability of a species to colonize elevated areas where it is usually not observed: such limitations naturally arise through competition with fitter species across marsh topographic gradients. We qualitatively test our model against field data based on a suitable assemblage of focus species, and perform a sensitivity analysis aimed at determining how dynamic equilibria in vegetation distributions are affected by changes in model input parameters. Results indicate that the model is robust and can predict realistic vegetation distributions and species-richness patterns. More importantly, the model is also able to effectively reproduce the outcomes of classical ecological experiments, wherein a species is transplanted to an area outside its realized niche. A direct comparison shows that previous models not accounting for dispersal and interspecific competitions are unable to reproduce such dynamics. Our model can be easily integrated into virtually any existing morphodynamic model, thereby strengthening our ability to simulate the coupled biotic and abiotic evolution of salt marshes under changing climate forcings.

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Megafauna in Salt Marshes

Cited by 7 publications

References 32 publications

Feral hogs control brackish marsh plant communities over time

Feral hogs control brackish marsh plant communities over time

Biota‐mediated carbon cycling—A synthesis of biotic‐interaction controls on blue carbon

A Minimalist Model of Salt-Marsh Vegetation Dynamics Driven by Species Competition and Dispersal

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