Document Type

Journal Article

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

School

School of Science

RAS ID

25638

Funders

Edith Cowan University Visiting Fellow Grant awarded to Dr Paul Wu

WAMSI as part of the WAMSI Dredging Science Node, Theme 9 (effects of dredging-related pressures on critical ecological processes)

Gladstone Ports Corporation (Gladstone)

North Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation (Hay Point)

Comments

Wu, P. P. Y., Mengersen, K., McMahon, K., Kendrick, G. A., Chartrand, K., York, P. H., ... & Caley, M. J. (2017). Timing anthropogenic stressors to mitigate their impact on marine ecosystem resilience. Nature Communications, 8, Article 1263.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01306-9

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.

DOI

10.1038/s41467-017-01306-9

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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