Understanding Marine Biodiversity (1995) / Chapter Skim
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4 REGIONALLY DEFINED MODEL SYSTEMS: EXAMPLES OF HABITATS
4 REGIONALLY DEFINED MODEL SYSTEMS: EXAMPLES OF HABITATS
Pages 35-45
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From page 35... ...
Levin, 19921. On the one hand, biological oceanographers have tended to emphasize ecosystem processes such as primary production operating on the scale of ocean currents and upwelling systems.
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From page 36... ...
The systems cover the complete range of spatial scales discussed earlier (see also Figure 3) , but the degree of understanding of processes that control biodiversity within and across these scales varies widely among the systems.
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From page 37... ...
Such coastal vegetation is ecologically critical as detrital and nutrient sources driving nearshore production, filters for land runoff, protection from coastal storms, sediment traps, and sediment stabilizers (Fenchel, 1977; Adam, 1990~. Marshes also have important aesthetic and recreational value in their "pristine" condition (Teal and Teal, 1969; Chabreck, 1988~.
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From page 38... ...
Reef organisms display extraordinary specializations, intensive predator-prey evolutionary pathways, and competitive interactions within and among species
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From page 39... ...
Excellent opportunities exist in coral reef systems to look directly at the dynamic interface between the natural patterns, processes, and consequences of biodiversity, and the increasing pressures from human activities. A broad range of observed transitions between different reef communities exhibiting differing levels of impacts and thus threshold effects effects that may be irreversible over the scale of a human lifetime (Knowlton, 1992)
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From page 40... ...
Source: Jackson (1994~. TEMPERATE ZONE ROCKY SHORES Rocky intertidal zones, and the shallow sublittoral kelp forests just below them, have provided the conceptual framework for research on most other benthic ecosystems (Cornell, 1961; Paine, 1980~.
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From page 41... ...
Directly and indirectly impacted by the natural and human effects that operate on land margins, the shelves are the only "open ocean" most people will ever see or know and yet the shelves are separated by boundary currents from most of the sea. The concept of shelf waters representing "the ocean" is reinforced by the popularization since the 1950s of "food from the sea," resulting in shelves being portrayed primarily as sites of most of the major world fisheries, located on fishing banks, in upwelling zones, and on broad shallow platforms.
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From page 42... ...
Shelf waters also provide opportunities to study multiple steady states in community composition, the reversibility of diversity shifts, and how long such reversals could or do take, species redundancy, and altered energy budgets. PELAGIC OPEN OCEAN The open oceans of the world cover nearly three-quarters of the Earth's surface and have been studied for well over 100 years; yet, there are continuing discoveries of new higher taxa and new communities.
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From page 43... ...
The fluid nature of pelagic environments shifts natural variability towards slowly developing, long-lived fluctuations. Many biological interactions occur over short temporal scales which, when coupled with the large spatial extent of many pelagic environments, result in subsystems that are similar in all but a few scales of environmental processes.
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From page 44... ...
At larger spatial scales, disturbances generated by upwelling regions, episodic strong currents (bottom boundary currents, canyons) , slumping (trenches or steep slopes)
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From page 45... ...
The surprisingly high diversity of benthic invertebrates in the deep sea hundreds of species cooccurring within a square meter of ocean floor provides a remarkable platform from which to renew empirical, experimental, and theoretical attempts to explain the causes and patterns of global diversity (Rex et al., 1993~. Although the deep sea is vast and remote, humans are still having an effect on this environment.
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