Foundation species recovery yields inconsistent recovery of associated community: a long-term experiment
preprint
OA: closed
Abstract
Foundation species recovery is often assumed to restore associated communities to their pre-disturbance state. However, community dynamics may differ due to species-specific responses, altered environmental conditions, or changes in biotic interactions that can override the influence of the recovering foundation species. In a 14-year experiment, we studied the loss and recovery of giant kelp and its associated rocky reef community. Alongside reference plots, we removed giant kelp for 6–7 years, then tracked recovery for another 6–7 years. After cessation of removal, giant kelp and community (understory macroalgae and sessile invertebrates) biomass rapidly converged on the reference condition. However, the composition of the community diverged from the starting point, indicating that recovery of community biomass can disguise species turnover in response to foundation species recovery. Our results highlight how stochastic forces can overwhelm the influence of foundation species to determine the structure of communities when recovering from disturbance.
Full text
2,157 characters
· extracted from
oa-doi-fallback
· 2 sections
· click to expand
Abstract
Foundation species recovery is often assumed to restore associated communities to their pre-disturbance state. However, community dynamics may differ due to species-specific responses, altered environmental conditions, or changes in biotic interactions that can override the influence of the recovering foundation species. In a 14-year experiment, we studied the loss and recovery of giant kelp and its associated rocky reef community. Alongside reference plots, we removed giant kelp for 6–7 years, then tracked recovery for another 6–7 years. After cessation of removal, giant kelp and community (understory macroalgae and sessile invertebrates) biomass rapidly converged on the reference condition. However, the composition of the community diverged from the starting point, indicating that recovery of community biomass can disguise species turnover in response to foundation species recovery. Our results highlight how stochastic forces can overwhelm the influence of foundation species to determine the structure of communities when recovering from disturbance.
Supplementary Material
File (01_main-text_2025-01.pdf)
- Download
- 276.58 KB
Information & Authors
Information
Version history
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Non Exclusive No Reuse License.
Keywords
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Article Usage
353views
254downloads
Citations
Download citation
An Bui, Max Castorani, Bartholomew DiFiore, et al.
Foundation species recovery yields inconsistent recovery of associated community: a long-term experiment. Authorea. 09 January 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.173639570.06246065/v1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.173639570.06246065/v1
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.
For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.
Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Ask this paper
Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
- unpaywall
- last seen: 2026-06-13T06:42:57.164913+00:00