Coastal ecosystems, such as estuaries, salt marshes, mangroves and seagrassmeadows, comprise some of theworld’s most productive and ecologically significant ecosystems. Currently, the predominant factor considered in valuing coastal wetlands as fish habitats is the contribution they make to offshore, adult fish stocks via ontogenetic migrations. However, the true value of coastal nurseries for ...

Mangroves provide multiple benefits, from carbon storage and shoreline protection to food and energy for natural resource-dependent coastal communities. However, they are coming under increasing pressure from climate change, coastal development, and aquaculture. There is increasing need to better understand the changes mangroves face and whether these changes differ or are similar in different ...

As coastal fisheries around the world have collapsed, industrial fishing has spread seaward and deeper in pursuit of the last economically attractive concentrations of fishable biomass. For a seafood-hungry world depending on the oceans’ ecosystem services, it is crucial to know whether deep-sea fisheries can

A preliminary foray into recent research on physical environmental conditions in Kota Ambon, reveals disturbing trends of ecosystem degradation and decline in quality of life for urban residents. Rapid population growth and urbanization activities have taken a massive toll on Ambon’s coastal environment, and in turn, environmental degradation is progressively undermining the quality of life of ...

The following information will familiarize you with ecosystems and their elements. Your students will visit several habitats during their field study so as to understand ecosystems as a whole. The following are descriptions of four habitats, which together make up a coastal ecosystem. This information should be presented to students prior to their visit and will be reinforced during their field...

Woody species have increased in abundance in many grassland ecosystems during the last century. To investigate the consequences of Baccharis pilularis encroachment into coastal California grasslands, we established a chronosequence of sites naturally invaded by Baccharis zero to 25 years ago. Increasing aboveand below-ground biomass increase along the chronosequence drove increases in ecosystem...

Satellite and in situ observations are used to test model dynamics for the California Current System (CCS). The model and data are combined to reconstruct the mesoscale ocean structure during a given three-week period. The resulting physical flow field is used to drive a 3D ecosystem model to interpret SeaWiFS and in situ chlorophyll-a (chl-a) variations. With this approach a more complete and ...

Marine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) encompasses one of the largest reservoirs of carbon on Earth. Heterotrophic bacteria are the primary biotic force regulating the fate of this material, yet the capacity of individual strains to significantly contribute to carbon cycling is unknown. Here we quantified the ability of a single Alteromonas strain [Alteromonas sp. strain Scripps Institution of O...