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A network of marine reserves can enhance yield in depleted fisheries by protecting populations, particularly large, old spawners that supply larvae for interspersed fishing grounds. The ability of marine reserves to enhance sustainable fisheries is much less evident. We report empirical evidence of a marine reserve network improving yield regionally for a sustainable spiny lobster fishery, apparently through the spillover of adult lobsters and behavioral adaptation by the fishing fleet. Results of a Before-After, Control-Impact analysis found catch, effort, and Catch-Per-Unit Effort increased after the establishment of marine reserves in the northern region of the fishery where fishers responded by fishing intensively at reserve borders, but declined in the southern region where they vacated once productive fishing grounds. The adaptation of the northern region of the fishery may have been aided by a history of collaboration between fishers, scientists, and managers, highlighting the value of collaborative research and education programs for preparing fisheries to operate productively within a seascape that includes a large marine reserve network.

 

The lack of community-relevant flood informational resources and tools often results in inadequate and divergent understandings of flood risk and can impede communities' ability to function cohesively in the face of increasing flood threats. The current study reports on a set of workshops that the authors conducted with various groups (citizens, city engineers and planners, realtors and builders, and media representatives) within a flood prone community to evaluate how novel hydroinformatic tools that include hydrodynamic modeling, geospatial visualization, and socioeconomic analysis can enhance understanding of flood risk and engagement in flood risk mitigation among diverse community members. The workshops were designed to help identify stakeholder preferences regarding key functionality needed for integrated hydroinformatic technologies and socioeconomic analyses for flood risk reduction. Workshop participants were asked to use and comment on examples of prototype flood risk informational tools, such as: (1) flood damage estimation tool, (2) drivability and emergency accessibility tool, and (3) community-scale social and economic metrics tool. Data gathered from workshops were analyzed using qualitative analysis based on a grounded-theory approach. Data were coded by hand based on themes identified by the research team and incorporated deviant case analysis to ensure minority opinions was represented. The study results are focused on the following main themes and how flood tools can address them: (1) improving the understanding of flood risk and engagement in flood risk mitigation, (2) reducing the gap between individual and community risk, (3) challenges in communicating flood risk information, (4) enhancing relevance to and engagement of the community, and (5) enabling actionable information. Our research demonstrates the need for community-anchored tools and technologies that can illustrate local context, include local historical and simulated events at multiple levels of community impact, enable analyses by flood professionals while also providing simplified tools of use by citizens, and allow individuals to expand their knowledge beyond their homes, businesses, and places of work. 

Ocean warming has both direct physiological and indirect ecological consequences for marine organisms. Sessile animals may be particularly vulnerable to anomalous warming given constraints in food acquisition and reproduction imposed by sessility. In temperate reef ecosystems, sessile suspension feeding invertebrates provide food for an array of mobile species and act as a critical trophic link between the plankton and the benthos. Using 14 years of seasonal benthic community data across five coastal reefs, we evaluated how communities of sessile invertebrates in southern California kelp forests responded to the “Blob”, a period of anomalously high temperatures and low phytoplankton production. We show that this event had prolonged consequences for kelp forest ecosystems. Changes to community structure, including species invasions, have persisted six years post-Blob, suggesting that a climate-driven shift in California kelp forests is underway.

 

abstract Coastal ecosystems play a disproportionately large role in society, and climate change is altering their ecological structure and function, as well as their highly valued goods and services. In the present article, we review the results from decade-scale research on coastal ecosystems shaped by foundation species (e.g., coral reefs, kelp forests, coastal marshes, seagrass meadows, mangrove forests, barrier islands) to show how climate change is altering their ecological attributes and services. We demonstrate the value of site-based, long-term studies for quantifying the resilience of coastal systems to climate forcing, identifying thresholds that cause shifts in ecological state, and investigating the capacity of coastal ecosystems to adapt to climate change and the biological mechanisms that underlie it. We draw extensively from research conducted at coastal ecosystems studied by the US Long Term Ecological Research Network, where long-term, spatially extensive observational data are coupled with shorter-term mechanistic studies to understand the ecological consequences of climate change. 

Macroscale additive manufacturing has seen significant advances recently, but these advances are not yet realized for the bottom-up formation of nanoscale polymeric features. We describe a platform technology for creating crosslinked polymer features using rapid surface-initiated crosslinking and versatile macrocrosslinkers, delivered by a microfluidic-coupled atomic force microscope known as FluidFM. A crosslinkable polymer containing norbornene moieties is delivered to a catalyzed substrate where polymerization occurs, resulting in extremely rapid chemical curing of the delivered material. Due to the living crosslinking reaction, construction of lines and patterns with multiple layers is possible, showing quantitative material addition from each deposition in a method analogous to fused filament fabrication, but at the nanoscale. Print parameters influenced printed line dimensions, with the smallest lines being 450 nm across with a vertical layer resolution of 2 nm. This nanoscale 3D printing platform of reactive polymer materials has applications for device fabrication, optical systems and biotechnology.