Hurricane impacts on coastal ecosystems

Abstract

Hurricanes, typhoons, and other cyclonic disturbances often produce sudden, massive disturbances in estuaries and other coastal ecosystems around the world. Compared with other ecological disturbances, such as prairie and forest fires, tree falls, and coral bleaching events, the effects of hurricanes are usually studied in isolation of each other and rarely as repeated or even ecologically predictable events across an area of sustained hurricane activity. Studies of their effects have rarely contributed to the growing body of theory on ecological disturbance and ecosystem resiliency and they are conspicuously absent from ecological textbooks. Since 1996, there has been an increase in the frequency of hurricane landfalls in the southeastern United States that is predicted to continue for some years into the future (Goldenberg et al. 2001; Emanuel 2005; Webster et al. 2005). Coupled with the availability of results from many water quality and biological monitoring programs now in place in these coastal systems, the increase in hurricane activity now provides an opportunity to begin the systematic investigation of how a series of hurricanes might produce cumulative and perhaps even irreversible effects on coastal ecosystems. One particular example that is highlighted in this special issue of Estuaries and Coasts is the occurrence of four major hurricanes to make landfall in Florida in a two-month period of 2004. In some localities, sequential hurricanes made landfall in close proximity to each other, while in other regions of coastal Florida, the repeated heavy rains associated with the multiple hurricanes had effects that were distinct from the wind and storm surge effects often associated with hurricanes.