Birds influence vegetation coverage and structure on sandy biogeomorphic islands in the Dutch Wadden Sea.

Small uninhabited islands form important roosting and breeding habitats for many coastal birds. Previous studies have demonstrated that guano can promote ecosystem productivity and functionality on island ecosystems. Here, we assess the role of external nutrient input by coastal birds on the vegetation structure and coverage on sandy biogeomorphic islands, where island-forming processes depend on vegetation-sedimentation feedbacks.

Harnessing ecological theory to enhance ecosystem restoration.

Ecosystem restoration can increase the health and resilience of nature and humanity. As a result, the international community is championing habitat restoration as a primary solution to address the dual climate and biodiversity crises. Yet most ecosystem restoration efforts to date have underperformed, failed, or been burdened by high costs that prevent upscaling.

Habitat modification by marram grass negatively affects recruitment of conspecifics.

Ecosystem engineers alter their environment often benefiting their own survival and growth yielding self-reinforcing feedbacks. Moreover, these habitat modifications have been found to facilitate recruitment of conspecifics for some species, while for others engineering inhibits recruitment. Whether dune grasses facilitate or inhibit recruitment of conspecifics is yet unknown.

The seafloor from a trait perspective. A comprehensive life history dataset of soft sediment macrozoobenthos.

Biological trait analysis (BTA) is a valuable tool for evaluating changes in community diversity and its link to ecosystem processes as well as environmental and anthropogenic perturbations. Trait-based analytical techniques like BTA rely on standardised datasets of species traits. However, there are currently only a limited number of datasets available for marine macrobenthos that contain trait data across multiple taxonomic groups.

Restoration ecology meets design-engineering: Mimicking emergent traits to restore feedback-driven ecosystems.

Ecosystems shaped by habitat-modifying organisms such as reefs, vegetated coastal systems and peatlands, provide valuable ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and coastal protection. However, they are declining worldwide. Ecosystem restoration is a key tool for mitigating these losses but has proven failure-prone, because ecosystem stability often hinges on self-facilitation generated by emergent traits from habitat modifiers.

Early indicators of tidal ecosystem shifts in estuaries.

Forecasting transitions between tidal ecosystem states, such as between bare tidal flats and vegetated marshes, is crucial because it may imply the irreversible loss of valuable ecosystem services. In this study, we combine geospatial analyses of three European estuaries with a simple numerical model to demonstrate that the development of micro-topographic patterning on tidal flats is an early indicator of marsh establishment. We first show that the development of micro-topographic patterns precedes vegetation establishment, and that patterns tend to form only on tidal flats with a slope of <0.

Phase-separation physics underlies new theory for the resilience of patchy ecosystems.

Spatial self-organization of ecosystems into large-scale (from micron to meters) patterns is an important phenomenon in ecology, enabling organisms to cope with harsh environmental conditions and buffering ecosystem degradation. Scale-dependent feedbacks provide the predominant conceptual framework for self-organized spatial patterns, explaining regular patterns observed in, e.g.

Recovering wetland biogeomorphic feedbacks to restore the world's biotic carbon hotspots.

Biogeomorphic wetlands cover 1% of Earth's surface but store 20% of ecosystem organic carbon. This disproportional share is fueled by high carbon sequestration rates and effective storage in peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows, which greatly exceed those of oceanic and forest ecosystems. Here, we review how feedbacks between geomorphology and landscape-building vegetation underlie these qualities and how feedback disruption can switch wetlands from carbon sinks into sources.

Adaptive intertidal seed-based seagrass restoration in the Dutch Wadden Sea.

Seagrasses form the foundation of many coastal ecosystems but are rapidly declining on a global scale. The Dutch Wadden Sea once supported extensive subtidal seagrass meadows that have all disappeared. Here, we report on the setbacks and successes of intertidal seed-based restoration experiments in the Dutch Wadden Sea between 2014-2017.

Overcoming establishment thresholds for peat mosses in human-made bog pools.

Globally, peatlands have been affected by drainage and peat extraction, with adverse effects on their functioning and services. To restore peat-forming vegetation, drained bogs are being rewetted on a large scale. Although this practice results in higher groundwater levels, unfortunately it often creates deep lakes in parts where peat was extracted to greater depths than the surroundings.

Restoration of biogeomorphic systems by creating windows of opportunity to support natural establishment processes.

In degraded landscapes, recolonization by pioneer vegetation is often halted by the presence of persistent environmental stress. When natural expansion does occur, it is commonly due to the momentary alleviation of a key environmental variable previously limiting new growth. Thus, studying the circumstances in which expansion occurs can inspire new restoration techniques, wherein vegetation establishment is provoked by emulating natural events through artificial means.

Saltmarsh resilience controlled by patch size and plant density of habitat-forming species that trap shells.

Habitat fragmentaion into small patches is regarded as a vital cause of biodiversity loss. Fragmentationof habitat-forming species is especially harmful, as patchiness of such species often controls ecosystem stability and resilience by density and patch size-dependent self-reinforcing feedbacks. Although fragmentation are expected to weaken or even break such feedbacks, it remains unclear how the resulting patchiness of habitat-forming species affect ecosystem resilience to environmental stresses.

Sediment availability provokes a shift from Brownian to Lévy-like clonal expansion in a dune building grass.

In biogeomorphic landscapes, plant traits can steer landscape development through plant-mediated feedback interactions. Interspecific differences in clonal expansion strategy can therefore lead to the emergence of different landscape organisations. Yet, whether landscape-forming plants adopt different clonal expansion strategies depending on their physical environment remains to be tested.

Mimicry of emergent traits amplifies coastal restoration success.

Restoration is becoming a vital tool to counteract coastal ecosystem degradation. Modifying transplant designs of habitat-forming organisms from dispersed to clumped can amplify coastal restoration yields as it generates self-facilitation from emergent traits, i.e.

Resilience of beach grasses along a biogeomorphic successive gradient: resource availability vs. clonal integration.

Coastal ecosystems are often formed through two-way interactions between plants and their physical landscape. By expanding clonally, landscape-forming plants can colonize bare unmodified environments and stimulate vegetation-landform feedback interactions. Yet, to what degree these plants rely on clonal integration for overcoming physical stress during biogeomorphological succession remains unknown.

Nutrient availability induces community shifts in seagrass meadows grazed by turtles.

In the Caribbean, green turtles graze seagrass meadows dominated by through rotational grazing, resulting in the creation of grazed and recovering (abandoned) patches surrounded by ungrazed seagrasses. We evaluated the seagrass community and its environment along a turtle grazing gradient; with the duration of (simulated) grazing as a proxy for the level of grazing pressure. The grazing levels consisted of Short-term (4 months clipping), Medium-term (8 months clipping), Long-term grazing (8 months of clipping in previously grazed areas), 8-months recovery of previously grazed patches, and ungrazed or unclipped patches as controls.

Elevated micro-topography boosts growth rates in Salicornia procumbens by amplifying a tidally driven oxygen pump: implications for natural recruitment and restoration.

Background And Aims: The growth rate of pioneer species is known to be a critical component determining recruitment success of marsh seedlings on tidal flats. By accelerating growth, recruits can reach a larger size at an earlier date, which reduces the length of the disturbance-free window required for successful establishment. Therefore, the pursuit of natural mechanisms that accelerate growth rates at a local scale may lead to a better understanding of the circumstances under which new establishment occurs, and may suggest new insights with which to perform restoration.

A Lévy expansion strategy optimizes early dune building by beach grasses.

Lifeforms ranging from bacteria to humans employ specialized random movement patterns. Although effective as optimization strategies in many scientific fields, random walk application in biology has remained focused on search optimization by mobile organisms. Here, we report on the discovery that heavy-tailed random walks underlie the ability of clonally expanding plants to self-organize and dictate the formation of biogeomorphic landscapes.

Foundation species enhance food web complexity through non-trophic facilitation.

Food webs are an integral part of every ecosystem on the planet, yet understanding the mechanisms shaping these complex networks remains a major challenge. Recently, several studies suggested that non-trophic species interactions such as habitat modification and mutualisms can be important determinants of food web structure. However, it remains unclear whether these findings generalize across ecosystems, and whether non-trophic interactions affect food webs randomly, or affect specific trophic levels or functional groups.

A facultative mutualistic feedback enhances the stability of tropical intertidal seagrass beds.

Marine foundation species such as corals, seagrasses, salt marsh plants, and mangrove trees are increasingly found to engage in mutualistic interactions. Because mutualisms by their very nature generate a positive feedback between the species, subtle environmental impacts on one of the species involved may trigger mutualism breakdown, potentially leading to ecosystem regime shifts. Using an empirically parameterized model, we investigate a facultative mutualism between seagrass and lucinid bivalves with endosymbiotic sulfide-oxidizing gill bacteria in a tropical intertidal ecosystem.

Behavioral self-organization underlies the resilience of a coastal ecosystem.

Self-organized spatial patterns occur in many terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems. Theoretical models and observational studies suggest self-organization, the formation of patterns due to ecological interactions, is critical for enhanced ecosystem resilience. However, experimental tests of this cross-ecosystem theory are lacking.

Copper treatment during storage reduces Phytophthora and Halophytophthora infection of Zostera marina seeds used for restoration.

Restoration is increasingly considered an essential tool to halt and reverse the rapid decline of vital coastal ecosystems dominated by habitat-forming foundation species such as seagrasses. However, two recently discovered pathogens of marine plants, Phytophthora gemini and Halophytophthora sp. Zostera, can seriously hamper restoration efforts by dramatically reducing seed germination.

The fundamental role of ecological feedback mechanisms for the adaptive management of seagrass ecosystems - a review.

Seagrass meadows are vital ecosystems in coastal zones worldwide, but are also under global threat. One of the major hurdles restricting the success of seagrass conservation and restoration is our limited understanding of ecological feedback mechanisms. In these ecosystems, multiple, self-reinforcing feedbacks can undermine conservation efforts by masking environmental impacts until the decline is precipitous, or alternatively they can inhibit seagrass recovery in spite of restoration efforts.