Local jurisdictions’ coastal zone land use plans play an important role in protecting critical coastal resources and ensuring coastal communities’ sustainable development. This study extends the previous national and regional measurement systems to local coastal zone land use planning. This study evaluates 46 California local jurisdictions’ coastal zone land use plans and analyzes the factors i...

The Antarctic and Arctic regions offer a unique opportunity to test factors shaping biogeography of marine microbial communities because these regions are geographically far apart, yet share similar selection pressures. Here, we report a comprehensive comparison of bacterioplankton diversity between polar oceans, using standardized methods for pyrosequencing the V6 region of the small subunit r...

Capacity building is widely recognised as a central feature of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM). Yet, although increased community capacity can potentially empower local communities with the ability to tackle the impacts of socio-economic change, an evaluation of ICZM performance reveals a limited interest in advancing community development initiatives. This weakness is particularly ap...

Disasters in the form of coastal storms and hurricanes can be very destructive. Preparing for anticipated effects of such disasters can help reduce the public health and economic burden. Identifying vulnerable population groups can help prioritize resources for the most needed communities. This paper presents a quantitative framework for vulnerability measurement that incorporates both socioeco...

—Nonpoint source pollution in the form of stormwater runoff is one of the most important emerging threats to ecosystems along the coastal margins of the United States. A wide diversity of potentially toxic chemicals is commonly found in stormwater. These include the various pesticides, petroleum hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and other common contaminants that originate from commercial, industrial...

Coastal ecosystems play significant ecological and economic roles but are threatened and facing decline. Microbes drive various biogeochemical processes in coastal ecosystems. Tidal flats are critical components of coastal ecosystems; however, the structure and function of microbial communities in tidal flats are poorly understood. Here we investigated the seasonal variations of bacterial commu...

Warming at nearly twice the global rate, higher than average air temperatures are the new 'normal' for Arctic ecosystems. This rise in temperature has triggered hydrological and geochemical changes that increasingly release carbon-rich water into the coastal ocean via increased riverine discharge, coastal erosion, and the thawing of the semi-permanent permafrost ubiquitous in the region. To det...

In order to characterize how disturbances to microbial communities are propagated over temporal and spatial scales in aquatic environments, the dynamics of bacterial assemblages throughout a subtropical coastal embayment were investigated via SSU rRNA gene analyses over an 8-month period, which encompassed a large storm event. During non-perturbed conditions, sampling sites clustered into three...

BACKGROUND Estuaries are highly productive ecosystems that can export organic matter to coastal seas (the 'outwelling hypothesis'). However the role of this food resource subsidy on coastal ecosystem functioning has not been examined. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We investigated the influence of estuarine primary production as a resource subsidy and the influence of estuaries on biodiversit...

Benthic microorganisms are key players in the recycling of organic matter and recalcitrant compounds such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in coastal sediments. Despite their ecological importance, the response of microbial communities to chronic PAH pollution, one of the major threats to coastal ecosystems, has received very little attention. In one of the largest surveys performed so far o...