Plant-mediated community structure of spring-fed, coastal rivers.

Quantifying ecosystem-level processes that drive community structure and function is key to the development of effective environmental restoration and management programs. To assess the effects of large-scale aquatic vegetation loss on fish and invertebrate communities in Florida estuaries, we quantified and compared the food webs of two adjacent spring-fed rivers that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. We constructed a food web model using field-based estimates of community absolute biomass and trophic interactions of a highly productive vegetated river, and modeled long-term simulations of vascular plant decline coupled with seasonal production of filamentous macroalgae.

On Making Statistical Inferences Regarding the Relationship between Spawners and Recruits and the Irresolute Case of Western Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus).

Forecasts of the future abundance of western Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) have, for nearly two decades, been based on two competing views of future recruitment potential: (1) a "low" recruitment scenario based on hockey-stick (two-line) curve where the expected level of recruitment is set equal to the geometric mean of the recruitment estimates for the years after a supposed regime-shift in 1975, and (2) a "high" recruitment scenario based on a Beverton-Holt curve fit to the time series of spawner-recruit pairs beginning in 1970. Several investigators inferred the relative plausibility of these two scenarios based on measures of their ability to fit estimates of spawning biomass and recruitment derived from stock assessment outputs. Typically, these comparisons have assumed the assessment estimates of spawning biomass are known without error.