| Popis: |
Having diverse functions within ecosystems helps increase ecosystem health, yet maintaining that functionality can prove difficult when conditions are stressful or functional redundancy fails. To test whether or not functional diversity has been altered, coral reef functional group abundances were tracked over three decades along the Belizean Barrier Reef System and modeled against human impacts and protection status to see if localized impacts were having an effect. Competitive, stress-tolerant, and weedy corals based on Grime’s C-S-R framework were grouped and tracked through time. Stress-tolerant species experienced a strong decline, while weedy and competitive species had a much smaller decline. These shifts have led to a historically unprecedented co-dominance between stress-tolerant species and weedy species in Belize, which has decreased the functional diversity of the reef through the loss of the key reef-building taxa Orbicella. Localized impacts were not found to be important for any functional groups, and future work should include regional and global factors such as sea surface temperature and temperature anomalies to understand what might have driven this shift in functional diversity. |
