Skip Navigation


ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on March 24, 2009
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2009 66(7):1520-1527; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsp045
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
66/7/1520    most recent
fsp045v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Baird, D.
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Baird, D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2009 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following ICES Journal of Marine Science issue: Effects of Climate Change on the World's Oceans [View the issue table of contents]

An assessment of the functional variability of selected coastal ecosystems in the context of local environmental changes

Dan Baird

Department of Botany and Zoology, University of Stellenbosch, Private Bag X1, Matieland, 7602 Stellenbosch, South Africa

tel: +27 21 808 3234; fax: +27 21 808 2408; e-mail: danbaird{at}sun.ac.za

Baird, D. (2009) An assessment of the functional variability of selected coastal ecosystems in the context of local environmental changes. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 1520–1527.

The functioning of coastal ecosystems is greatly dependent on a wide variety of external pulses (e.g. tides, freshwater influx, seasonal trends in temperature, nutrient input, etc.). Assessments of the effect of a selection of environmental characteristics driven by natural and/or anthropogenic forces on ecosystem function are given using selected ecosystem properties, such as total system throughput, system organization, productivity, recycling, and trophic efficiency, derived from ecological network analysis (ENA) of several coastal ecosystems on monthly, intra-seasonal, seasonal, and interdecadal scales. Each ecosystem was modelled depicting data of standing stocks, the flows between the constituent living and non-living components in the system, exports, and imports. Results from ENA revealed considerable differences of the same property (or properties) resulting from physical changes (e.g. temperature, salinity, oxygen, rate of freshwater inflow) over time. A small temperature increase in a Florida seagrass bed, for example, resulted in increases in system throughput, the P/B ratio, and in the rate of carbon recycling, but also in a significant decrease in system organization. The effect of seasonal increases in water temperature and of measured decrease/increase in river run-off to a few selected estuaries is discussed using ENA.

Keywords: climate change, coastal ecosystems, environmental characteristics, spatial comparisons, system properties, temporal scales

Received 15 August 2008; accepted 4 February 2009; advance access publication 24 March 2009.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.