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Life in the Mosaic: Predicting changes in estuarine nursery production for juvenile fishes in response to sea-level rise with a landscape-based habitat production model
Citation:
FULFORD, R. S., M. P. PETERSON, W. WU, AND P. GRAMMER. Life in the Mosaic: Predicting changes in estuarine nursery production for juvenile fishes in response to sea-level rise with a landscape-based habitat production model. Presented at Ecological Society of America 97th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR, August 05 - 10, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
ESA oral presentation
Description:
Identification of critical habitat in estuarine fish nursery areas is an important conservation and management objective, yet response to changes in critical habitat is both equally important and harder to predict. Habitat can be viewed as a mosaic of both temporally variable environmental features and spatially variable structural features that combine to define optimal habitat. Effective models of population responses to habitat change should account for individual response to change, as well as the full suite of temporal and spatial habitat variability. We have extended a spatially-explicit individual-based model of small-scale movement to describe habitat choices of an index juvenile fish in an estuarine nursery system. The objective was to compare responses in movement and production across a spectrum of spatial and temporal heterogeneity as a precursor for predictions of population-level responses to habitat change. The model was validated based on an examination of movement, distribution, and net production of immigrating juvenile spot, Leiostomus xanthurus in the Pascagoula river estuary, MS, USA. The validated model was used to explore responses of juvenile fishes to predicted changes in coastal marsh habitat resulting from a 0.24 m sea level rise (SLR) between 2007 and 2100 in this northern Gulf of Mexico estuary.