Speaker: Candy Feller
Animal-Plant Interaction Lab

Summary: Climate change is causing a poleward shift in the distribution, phenology, and abundance of many species and ecosystems around the world. Temperate and tropical plants and animals are migrating poleward in response to global warming, displacing native species, altering biodiversity patterns, and modifying ecosystem structure and function. My collaborators and I are focused on the consequences of climate change for coastal wetlands at the transition between temperate and tropical zones. Our goal is to investigate the current and future climate-driven displacement of temperate salt marshes by tropical and subtropical mangroves. However, it is difficult to predict the future if you don’t know the past. To understand changes that have occurred in the mangrove-saltmarsh landscape along the coast of Florida over the past two and a half centuries, we have analyzed the following resources: 1) Landsat images between 1984 and 2011; 2) historical aerial photography and satellite imagery between 1942 and 2014; and 3) historical accounts dating back to 1765.  Historical records coupled with the recent data show that mangrove range shifts are happening now and have also happened in the past. The long-term patterns indicate that these shifts are neither gradual nor monotonic. Rather, the range edge is both advancing and contracting in response to climatic conditions and disturbance events, which result in periodic regime shifts in the dominant foundation species.