Using long term research on sea otters and kelp forest food webs to study the effects of climate change on coastal ecosystems
Desription of Presentation:
Near-shore marine ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to combined impacts of climate change and anthropogenic influences at the land-sea interface, particularly in areas of dense human populations and altered landscapes such as coastal California. Climate change is expected to affect a wide array of processes in near-shore systems: primary productivity, algal/diatom blooms, faunal recruitment patterns, species distribution and abundance, infectious disease and host-pathogen interactions, fresh-water run-off and coastal impacts of wildfires, to name a few. As apex predators in kelp forest ecosystems, sea otters are an ideal sentinel species for understanding these impacts because of their tractability for study, and because they integrate the effects of interest across multiple spatial scales and trophic levels.
Presenter Name & Contact Info:
Dr. M. Tim Tinker USGS-WERC Santa Cruz Field Station, 100 Shaffer Rd., Long Marine Lab, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Dr. Tim Tinker is a Research Wildlife Biologist with the Western Ecological Research Center of the U.S. Geological Survey, and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz. For 15 years he has been studying sea otter populations in Alaska, California and the Russian Commander Islands. Working with Dr. James Estes, Dr. Tinker played a key role in learning about the causes and effects of the sea otter population decline in the Aleutian archipelago through the 1990's, and continues to study these threatened populations. More recently he has focused on the foraging ecology and demography of the southern sea otter, using multiple lines of investigation-- including studies of animal behavior and physiology, food web interactions and anthropogenic impacts-- to understand factors limiting sea otter populations in central California. Dr. Tinker's areas of interest include quantitative conservation ecology, with a particular emphasis on modeling population dynamics. He is also interested in individual behavioral strategies, and seeks to understand the ways in which variation in behavior scales up to population-level and community-level dynamics.
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