Abstract
Despite a long history of disturbance–recovery research, we still lack a generalizable understanding of the attributes that drive community recovery potential in seafloor ecosystems. Marine soft‐sediment ecosystems encompass a range of heterogeneity from simple low‐diversity habitats with limited biogenic structure, to species‐rich systems with complex biogenic habitat structure. These differences in biological heterogeneity are a product of natural conditions and disturbance regimes. To search for unifying attributes, we explore whether a set of simple traits can characterize community disturbance–recovery potential using seafloor patch‐disturbance experiments conducted in two different soft‐sediment landscapes. The two landscapes represent two ends of a spectrum of landscape biotic heterogeneity in order to consider multi‐scale disturbance–recovery processes. We consider traits at different levels of biological organization, from the biological traits of individual species, to the traits of species at the landscape scale associated with their occurrence across the landscape and their ability to be dominant. We show that in a biotically heterogeneous landscape (Kawau Bay, New Zealand), seafloor community recovery is stochastic, there is high species turnover, and the landscape‐scale traits are good predictors of recovery. In contrast, in a biotically homogeneous landscape (Baltic Sea), the options for recovery are constrained, the recovery pathway is thus more deterministic and the scale of recovery traits important for determining recovery switches to the individual species biological traits within the disturbed patch. Our results imply that these simple, yet sophisticated, traits can be effectively used to characterize community recovery potential and highlight the role of landscapes in providing resilience to patch‐scale disturbances.
Highlights
ORIGINAL RESEARCHIdentifying “vital attributes” for assessing disturbance–recovery potential of seafloor communities
We used AIC in backward selection to select which scale of recovery traits (FDisI or FDisLS) best explained variation in recovery in each dataset, and we present the best model from this selection
Our analysis demonstrates that some very simple traits can be effective at predicting recovery, and the comparison of the importance of species and landscape traits in the two experiments reveals interesting insights into the spectrum of different recovery outcomes
Summary
Identifying “vital attributes” for assessing disturbance–recovery potential of seafloor communities. Brustolin1 | Anna Villnäs2,5 | Sebastian Valanko2,6 | Alf Norkko. Gladstone-Gallagher, Institute of Marine Science, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand. Funding information New Zealand Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship; Walter ja Andrée de Nottbeckin Säätiö; Academy of Finland, Grant/Award Number: 323212
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