Declines over the last two decades of five intertidal invertebrate species in the western North Atlantic.

Climate change has already altered the environmental conditions of the world's oceans. Here we report declines in gastropod abundances and recruitment of mussels (Mytilus edulis) and barnacles (Semibalanus balanoides) over the last two decades that are correlated with changes in temperature and ocean conditions. Mussel recruitment is declining by 15.

Effects of increased temperature on plant communities depend on landscape location and precipitation.

Global climate change is affecting and will continue to affect ecosystems worldwide. Specifically, temperature and precipitation are both expected to shift globally, and their separate and interactive effects will likely affect ecosystems differentially depending on current temperature, precipitation regimes, and other biotic and environmental factors. It is not currently understood how the effects of increasing temperature on plant communities may depend on either precipitation or where communities lie on soil moisture gradients.

Soil and ecosystem respiration responses to grazing, watering and experimental warming chamber treatments across topographical gradients in northern Mongolia.

Globally, soil respiration is one of the largest fluxes of carbon to the atmosphere and is known to be sensitive to climate change, representing a potential positive feedback. We conducted a number of field experiments to study independent and combined impacts of topography, watering, grazing and climate manipulations on bare soil and vegetated soil (i.e.

Leaf-trait plasticity and species vulnerability to climate change in a Mongolian steppe.

Climate change is expected to modify plant assemblages in ways that will have major consequences for ecosystem functions. How climate change will affect community composition will depend on how individual species respond, which is likely related to interspecific differences in functional traits. The extraordinary plasticity of some plant traits is typically neglected in assessing how climate change will affect different species.

Climate change and grazing interact to alter flowering patterns in the Mongolian steppe.

Socio-economic changes threaten nomadic pastoralism across the world, changing traditional grazing patterns. Such land-use changes will co-occur with climate change, and while both are potentially important determinants of future ecosystem functioning, interactions between them remain poorly understood. We investigated the effects of grazing by large herbivores and climate manipulation using open-top chambers (OTCs) on flower number and flowering species richness in mountain steppe of northern Mongolia.

Plant response to climate change varies with topography, interactions with neighbors, and ecotype.

Predicting the future of any given species represents an unprecedented challenge in light of the many environmental and biological factors that affect organismal performance and that also interact with drivers of global change. In a three-year experiment set in the Mongolian steppe, we examined the response of the common grass Festuca lenensis to manipulated temperature and water while controlling for topographic variation, plant-plant interactions, and ecotypic differentiation. Plant survival and growth responses to a warmer, drier climate varied within the landscape.

Vulnerability of the northern Mongolian steppe to climate change: insights from flower production and phenology.

The semiarid, northern Mongolian steppe, which still supports pastoral nomads who have used the steppe for millennia, has experienced an average 1.7 degrees C temperature rise over the past 40 years. Continuing climate change is likely to affect flowering phenology and flower numbers with potentially important consequences for plant community composition, ecosystem services, and herder livelihoods.

Experimental confirmation of multiple community states in a marine ecosystem.

Small changes in environmental conditions can unexpectedly tip an ecosystem from one community type to another, and these often irreversible shifts have been observed in semi-arid grasslands, freshwater lakes and ponds, coral reefs, and kelp forests. A commonly accepted explanation is that these ecosystems contain multiple stable points, but experimental tests confirming multiple stable states have proven elusive. Here we present a novel approach and show that mussel beds and rockweed stands are multiple stable states on intertidal shores in the Gulf of Maine, USA.

An intertidal snail shows a dramatic size increase over the past century.

Changes in the shell architecture of marine snails enhance defenses and greatly improve survival against predators. In the northwest Atlantic Ocean, shorter and thicker shells have been reported for several species following the introduction of predatory Carcinus maenas crabs early in the 20th century. But we report that the shell lengths of Nucella lapillus actually increased by an average of 22.

PROPAGATION OF SCALE-DEPENDENT EFFECTS FROM RECRUITS TO ADULTS IN BARNACLES AND SEAWEEDS.

The interplay between local and large spatial scale processes in open systems is often dependent upon ecological context and species specific factors such as longevity, dispersal capability, or vulnerability to predation. When disturbance clears patches in open systems, the successful reestablishment of adult colonizers and the trajectory of succession may depend upon both the scale of the disturbance event and scale of life history characteristics. Here we examine the links between the size of a disturbance event and long term patterns of variation in recruitment, density, and percent cover in a relatively short-lived but long-range disperser, the acorn barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, and a relatively long lived and short range disperser, the fucoid alga Fucus vesiculosus.

Direct and indirect effects of predation, herbivory and surface rugosity on mussel recruitment.

The predatory gastropod Nucella lapillus, commonly preys upon the mussel, Mytilus edulis, and is thought to control the distribution and abundance of mussels on the rocky shores of New England, USA. In this study, done in Maine, USA, not only the presence of Nucella lapillus but also the roughness of the experimental surface and the presence of the herbivorous gastropod, Littorina littorea, were manipulated. Four types of surfaces were used as recruitment substrata for mussels: smooth bare granite, aggregations of the barnacle, Semibalanus balanoides, fiberglass resin castings of smooth bare granite and resin castings of aggregations of S.