Nearshore benthis plants and animals comprise some of the world's most diverse communities, with species that have adapted to survive in both the harsh open air and the violent crashing waters that flow onto the coast every day.
This complex community responds to impacts from the land, sea and air, and integrates human impacts from all of these environments.
Benthic plants and animals that live along the coast and in the first 20 meters of the ocean, commonly called the nearshore, have been closely monitored in Prince William Sound since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. In that year, nearshore species suffered a 50-90% population reduction, and many of the plant and animal communities shifted to favor entirely new species. Algal communities recovered just a few years after the spill, but invertebrates such as clams and mussles were slow to follow, and birds and mammals have been in the recovery process for more than 10 years.
"We cannot prevent disasters such as this one, or one such as the 1964 earthquake that I suspected to have caused a major shift in invertebrate communities," said Dr. Tom Dean of Coastal Resources Associates. "However, with a better long-term understanding of the way these communities work, we could help to solve the problems more quickly. "There is not a lot of data to give us long term trends," he added. "If we had a long-term data set prior to some of these events, perhaps we could have ameliorated some of the effects."
Dean is part of an ongoing nearshore project that is part of the Gulf Ecosystem Monitoring (GEM) program and aims to track these long-terms changes and trends in nearshore communities. The program involves physical mapping of the coast environment, and identification of intensive and extensive site studies to determine what plants, marine animals, and birds live on the shores or rely on the shores for survival. As these systems are tracked over a long period of time, scientists will begin to develop an understanding of how these communities interact with the land, sea and air that they live in.
Information from the PWSOS on the physical nature of the Sound will allow them to combine long-term oceanographic data with long-term ecosystem data to determine how communities are affected by their environments, and how environments are affected by people. Dean suspects that in the future ecosystems in PWS will be largely affected by human impacts and global climate change. By studying these ecosystems early, scientists will be able to intervene at appropriate times to relieve these and other stressors.
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