ABSTRACT
Coastal aquatic ecosystems are vulnerable to climate change as well as anthropogenic activities in proximal coastal zone and upstream watersheds, which often interact to degrade the physical, environmental and biological conditions available to flora and fauna. Bottom-associated (benthic) communities, which directly facilitate many key ecological roles in coastal ecosystems, are particularly vulnerable to changes in water quality. We analyzed the response of the Chesapeake Bay benthic community to a suite of climate-relevant factors using long-term monitoring program data and a flexible, non-linear generalized additive modeling framework. We found evidence of long-term patterns in benthic biodiversity in Chesapeake Bay and evidence that two of three metrics of biodiversity were related to climate factors and site-level covariates in Chesapeake Bay. These factors included environmental indices of river flow, water temperature, dissolved oxygen concentration, and phytoplankton biomass. Future work that builds on this analysis should consider the potential mechanistic association of these and other predictors on biodiversity, evaluate the importance of scale-dependence on the explanatory power of climate indices, and investigate functional diversity and species-specific responses to climate forcing. While our analysis focuses on Chesapeake Bay, the processes and relationships present within this estuary are likely to be similar to other coastal ecosystems.
