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Abstract Climate change is negatively impacting ecosystems and their contributions to human well‐being, known as ecosystem services. Previous research has mainly focused on the direct effects of climate change on species and ecosystem services, leaving a gap in understanding the indirect impacts resulting from changes in species interactions within complex ecosystems. This knowledge gap is significant because the loss of a species in a food web can lead to additional species losses or “co‐extinctions,” particularly when the species most impacted by climate change are also the species that play critical roles in food web persistence or provide ecosystem services. Here, we present a framework to investigate the relationships among species vulnerability to climate change, their roles within the food web, their contributions to ecosystem services, and the overall persistence of these systems and services in the face of climate‐induced species losses. To do this, we assess the robustness of food webs and their associated ecosystem services to climate‐driven species extinctions in eight empirical rocky intertidal food webs. Across food webs, we find that highly connected species are not the most vulnerable to climate change. However, we find species that directly provide ecosystem services are more vulnerable to climate change and more connected than species that do not directly provide services, which results in ecosystem service provision collapsing before food webs. Overall, we find that food webs are more robust to climate change than the ecosystem services they provide and show that combining species roles in food webs and services with their vulnerability to climate change offer predictions about the impacts of co‐extinctions for future food web and ecosystem service persistence. However, these conclusions are limited by data availability and quality, underscoring the need for more comprehensive data collection on linking species roles in interaction networks and their vulnerabilities to climate change. 

Abstract Wave‐generated flows, associated hydrodynamic forces, and disturbances created by them play critical roles in determining the structure and health of near‐shore coastal ecosystems. Oscillatory motions produced by waves increase delivery of nutrients and food to benthic organisms, and can enhance vertical mixing to facilitate delivery of larvae and spores to the seafloor. At the same time, wave disturbances can remove individuals and biomass with far‐reaching effects on critical coastal ecosystems and the biodiversity within them. Commercial instruments designed to measure wave characteristics and the effects of wave energy can be expensive to purchase and deploy, limiting their use in large quantities or in areas where they may be lost. We have developed an inexpensive open‐source pressure transducer data logger based on an Arduino microcontroller that can be used to characterize wave conditions for deployments lasting multiple months. Our design criteria centered around simplicity, longevity, low cost, and ease of use for researchers. Housed in ubiquitous polyvinylchloride (PVC) plumbing and constructed primarily with readily available materials, the Open Wave Height Logger (OWHL) can be fabricated in a college setting with basic shop tools. The OWHL performs comparably to commercial pressure‐based wave height data loggers during tests in the field, creating the opportunity to expand the use of these sensors for applications where sufficient spatial replication or risk of instrument loss would otherwise be cost prohibitive.