The importance of herbivores and of plant diversity for community succession and recovery from disturbance is well documented. However, few studies have assessed the relative magnitude of, or potential interactions between, these factors. To determine the combined effect of herbivory and surrounding algal species richness on the recovery of a rocky intertidal community, we conducted a 27-month ...

Experimental mesocosm studies of rocky shore and estuarine intertidal systems may benefit from the application of natural tide cycles to better replicate variation in immersion time, water depth, and attendant fluctuations in abiotic and edaphic conditions. Here we describe a stand-alone microcontroller tide prediction open-source software program, coupled with a mechanical tidal elevation cont...

Rock pools are dynamic and intermittently isolated habitats in the rocky intertidal. They can be used as model systems to provide a more general insight into the ecology of patchy habitats, which are less amenable to experimentation, such as islands and wildlife reserves. In the present study, a range of pools of differing sizes was selected at 2 vertical levels on the shore to assess the impor...

Physical constraints, and particularly hydrodynamics, are major drivers of macroalgal canopy-dominated rocky shore communities. The abundance habitat-forming seaweeds decreases with increasing wave exposure, triggering cascading effects on their associated This study aims at describing the structure benthic communities along a hydrodynamic gradient understanding role height in structuring ecolo...

The April 1st 2014 Iquique earthquake (MW 8.1) occurred along the northern Chile margin where the Nazca plate is subducted below the South American continent. The last great megathrust earthquake here, in 1877 of Mw ~8.8 opened a seismic gap, which was only partly closed by the 2014 earthquake. Prior to the earthquake in 2013, and shortly after it we compared data from leveled benchmarks, deplo...

Topographical wave exposure indices allow objective assessment of the degree of wave action at coastal sites. We present a grid-based method for rapidly calculating indices at fine spatial resolutions along whole coastlines, and evaluate the power of candidate indices in predicting composition of rocky shore communities. The method has 3 stages: (1) a grid is created from a vector-based digital...