Jimmy Nelson

Jimmy Nelson
University of Georgia | UGA · Department of Marine Sciences

Ph.D.

About

57
Publications
32,181
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,557
Citations
Introduction
I am interested in the fish related components of marine ecosystems and use a wide variety of tools to conduct my research (e.g. stable/radio isotopes, telemetry, field work). Please visit my website: https://www.nelsonecolab.net/
Additional affiliations
May 2011 - June 2015
Marine Biological Laboratory
Position
  • Research Assistant
Education
September 2006 - May 2011
Florida State University
Field of study
  • Chemical Oceanography

Publications

Publications (57)
Article
Full-text available
Classic bottom-up theory predicts that increased resource availability (for example, nutrients) at the base of the food web will stimulate primary production and, in turn, secondary production. Recent studies, however, indicate that bottom-up controls on food web production can be modified by other factors, such as landscape configuration and conti...
Article
Full-text available
The use of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), commonly referred to as drones, has rapidly expanded across many scientific disciplines. Like other fields, fisheries research would benefit significantly from broader use of this emerging technology but has lagged behind other disciplines. Like the implementation of satellite and aircraft‐based remote s...
Article
The primary goal of habitat restoration is to recover the ecological structure, function, and services of natural ecosystems lost due to disturbance. Post-restoration success typically focuses on the return of a desired habitat type, consumer species composition, or abundance relative to a reference site. However, how energy flow responds to habita...
Article
Full-text available
The great anthropogenic alterations occurring to carbon availability in the oceans necessitate an understanding of the energy requirements of species and how changes in energy availability may impact biodiversity. The deep-sea floor is characterized naturally by extremely low availability of chemical energy and is particularly vulnerable to changes...
Article
Full-text available
The production and transfer of biomass through trophic relationships is a core ecosystem function. The movement of energy through the food web is mediated by organisms operating in their niche space. For generalists, the size of this niche space is inherently plastic and changes in response to available food sources. Therefore, this relationship be...
Article
Full-text available
The Florida Everglades is a critically important, but highly threatened ecosystem that is becoming increasingly susceptible to the invasion of non-native species. This study investigated the ecological role of the invasive peacock eel (Macrognathus siamensis) within this ecosystem using 15 years of electrofishing data and stable isotope analysis. W...
Article
Full-text available
Coastal marsh ecosystems are changing and being lost at a rapid rate around the world. One of the fastest rates of land loss, specifically coastal marsh habitat, occurs in Louisiana on the Northern Gulf Coast of the USA. To address this issue, state and federal agencies have undertaken massive wetland restoration efforts to preserve and restore coa...
Presentation
Full-text available
Cross-site comparison of fiddler crab resource use along the U.S. Atlantic coast Eric Gomez Gonzalez, James A. Nelson, James W. Sturges, Jennifer S. Rehage, Rolando O. Santos, and W. Ryan James Within the last decade, there has been in a northern expansion in the population range of the fiddler crab species Minuca pugnax. This expansion is most l...
Article
Natural and anthropogenic disturbances have led to rapid declines in the amount and quality of available habitat in many ecosystems. Many studies have focused on how habitat loss has affected the composition and configuration of habitats, but there have been fewer studies that investigate how this loss affects ecosystem function. We investigated ho...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Florida Everglades is a critically important, but highly threatened ecosystem that is becoming increasingly susceptible to the invasion of non-native species. This study investigated the ecological role of the invasive peacock eel ( Macrognathus siamensis ) within this ecosystem using 19 years of electrofishing data. We investigated the populat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Coastal nutrient loading is a primary driver of changes to habitat structure, species diversity, and increases in hypoxia and harmful algal blooms in estuaries worldwide. The difficulty of identifying non-point source inputs of nutrients often hinders the management and mitigation of these nutrient loads. Using stable isotopes, this study aimed to...
Article
Riverine floodplains serve as an important link between terrestrial and aquatic systems, as the rising and falling of water drive spatial food web subsidies that are critical to the functioning and stability of ecosystems. As these systems are increasingly impacted by hydrological alterations and climate change, it is important to understand how fl...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is altering species’ range limits and transforming ecosystems. For example, warming temperatures are leading to the range expansion of tropical, cold-sensitive species at the expense of their cold-tolerant counterparts. In some temperate and subtropical coastal wetlands, warming winters are enabling mangrove forest encroachment into...
Article
Full-text available
Consumers can influence ecological patterns and processes through their trophic roles and contributions to the flow of energy through ecosystems. However, the diet and associated trophic roles of consumers commonly change during ontogeny. Despite the prevalence of ontogenetic variation in trophic roles of most animals, we lack an understanding of w...
Article
Full-text available
Seagrass beds in Florida Bay are home to many ecologically and economically important species. Anthropogenic press perturbation via alterations in hydrology and pulse perturbations such as drought can lead to hypersalinity, hypoxia, and sulfide toxicity, ultimately causing seagrass die-offs. Florida Bay has undergone two large-scale seagrass die-of...
Article
Developing conservation and management strategies for species with complex life histories, broad spatial distributions, and long lifespans is notoriously difficult. Too often managers cannot identify critical habitats nor vulnerable life stages because of the sheer scale of migration or uncertainty about connectivity among populations. Advancements...
Article
Macrophyte foundation species provide both habitat structure and primary production, and loss of these habitats can alter species interactions and lead to changes in energy flow in food webs. Extensive seagrass meadows in Florida Bay have recently experienced a widespread loss of seagrass habitat due to a Thalassia testudinum mass mortality event i...
Preprint
Full-text available
Consumers can influence ecological patterns and processes through their trophic roles and contributions to the flow of energy through ecosystems. However, the diet and associated trophic roles of consumers commonly changes during ontogeny. Despite the prevalence of ontogenetic variation in trophic roles of most animals, we lack an understanding of...
Article
Full-text available
Habitat fragmentation of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) transforms the spatial pattern of seascapes by changing both the total area and spatial configuration of the habitat patches. The ecological effects of SAV seascapes are most often assessed using metrics of biological community composition (e.g., species and assemblage changes). We know co...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is transforming ecosystems and affecting ecosystem goods and services. Along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts of the southeastern United States, the frequency and intensity of extreme freeze events greatly influences whether coastal wetlands are dominated by freeze‐sensitive woody plants (mangrove forests) or freeze‐tolerant gr...
Article
Full-text available
Energetic resources and habitat distribution are inherently linked. Energetic resource availability is a major driver of the distribution of consumers, but estimating how much specific habitats contribute to the energetic resource needs of a consumer can be problematic. We present a new approach that combines remote sensing information and stable i...
Article
In New England saltmarshes, mummichogs (Fundulus heteroclitus) connect the vegetated marsh and creek food webs by opportunistically foraging on the invertebrate communities of the marsh surface when access is permitted by tidal flooding and marsh-edge geomorphology. Via their movements, mummichog represent a critical food web node, as they can pote...
Article
Full-text available
Seascape ecology, the marine-centric counterpart to landscape ecology, is rapidly emerging as an interdisciplinary and spatially explicit ecological science with relevance to marine management, biodiversity conservation and restoration. While important progress in this field has been made in the past decade, there has been no coherent prioritisatio...
Article
Full-text available
The use of nutrients by diverse phytoplankton communities in estuarine systems, and their response to changes in physical and biogeochemical processes in these natural systems, is a significant ongoing area of research. We used a whole ecosystem 15NO3− tracer experiment to determine the uptake of different nitrogen (N) forms in phytoplankton functi...
Article
Assimilation wetlands are natural, non-constructed, wetlands that are used for the removal of nutrients from treated municipal wastewater. This passive process is comparatively less expensive than other conventional forms of tertiary treatment of wastewater, making it desirable for municipalities. Assimilation wetlands are monitored for a number of...
Article
Coastal salt marshes are distributed widely across the globe and are considered essential habitat for many fish and crustacean species. Yet, the literature on fishery support by salt marshes has largely been based on a few geographically distinct model systems, and as a result, inadequately captures the hierarchical nature of salt marsh pattern, pr...
Chapter
Full-text available
The coupling of geomorphological and ecological processes is critical for the maintenance or disappearance of salt marshes. Emergent macrophytes dampen wave- and tide-generated shear stresses promoting sediment deposition and marsh formation. The complex interactions among marsh primary productivity, sea level, and sedimentation determine the equil...
Article
Full-text available
Excess reactive nitrogen (N) flows from agricultural, suburban, and urban systems to coasts, where it causes eutrophication. Coastal wetlands take up some of this N, thereby ameliorating the impacts on nearshore waters. Although the consequences of N on coastal wetlands have been extensively studied, the effect of the specific form of N is not ofte...
Article
Full-text available
The movement and foraging patterns of consumers are a major driver of nutrient and energy distribution in ecosystems. However, relatively little is known about how intraspecific variation in consumer movement behavior might affect food web coupling and ecosystem processes across landscapes and seascapes. Here we use long-term acoustic telemetry and...
Article
Full-text available
The movement and foraging patterns of consumers are a major driver of nutrient and energy distribution in ecosystems. However, relatively little is known about how intraspecific variation in consumer movement behavior might affect food web coupling and ecosystem processes across landscapes and seascapes. Here we use long‐term acoustic telemetry and...
Article
The recovery of natural energy flow in food webs is an important indication that a restoration project has been a success, yet is typically considered a challenging component of post-restoration monitoring protocols. Advancements in remote sensing and SIA offer unique opportunities to build and test new metrics that more easily measure food web rec...
Article
Full-text available
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/670.1
Article
Full-text available
Climate change driven sea level rise and mangrove expansion are rapidly altering coastal systems in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Such substantial and wide-spread change will likely have substantial effects on the flow of energy through the food webs in these systems. Using stable isotopes and habitat cover maps, we built energetic landscapes (E-sca...
Preprint
Full-text available
Energy and habitat distribution are inherently linked. Energy is a major driver of the distribution of consumers, but estimating how much specific habitats contribute to the energetic needs of a consumer can be problematic. We present a new approach that combines remote sensing information and stable isotope ecology to produce maps of energetic res...
Article
Consumer-mediated movement can couple food webs in distinct habitats and facilitate energy flow between them. In New England saltmarshes, mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) use the flooding spring tides to access the high marsh platform and eat invertebrate prey, coupling the high marsh and aquatic creek food webs by gathering energy produced on the...
Article
Full-text available
The production and transfer of biomass through trophic relationships is a core ecosystem function. The movement of energy through the food web is mediated by organisms operating in their niche space. For generalists, the size of this niche space is inherently plastic and changes in response to available food sources. Therefore, this relationship be...
Article
Full-text available
Bergmann's rule predicts that organisms at higher latitudes are larger than ones at lower latitudes. Here, we examine the body size pattern of the Atlantic marsh fiddler crab, Minuca pugnax (formerly Uca pugnax), from salt marshes on the east coast of the United States across 12 degrees of latitude. We found that M. pugnax followed Bergmann's rule...
Article
Full-text available
In the Northern Gulf of Mexico, black mangroves (Avicennia germinans) are expanding their range and replacing smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) as the dominant foundation species in estuarine systems. The impact this habitat transition has on the sources of primary production that contribute to the food webs of these areas is as of yet uncle...
Article
Habitat selection by organisms can be driven by a number of factors, including the availability of resources. In particular, nutrient enrichment can alter the quality of landscapes, and thus the availability of resources, with implications for consumer movement and habitat use. In coastal ecosystems, eutrophication can affect the production and dis...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
Article
Full-text available
Two groups of common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have been identified within St. George Sound, Florida, USA: high site-fidelity individuals (HSF) which are individuals sighted multiple times in the region (i.e., ≥2 months, ≥2 seasons, and ≥2 years), and low site-fidelity individuals (LSF), which are individuals sighted fewer than 2 mon...
Article
In addition to their important effects on nitrogen (N) cycling via excretion and assimilation (by macrofauna and macroflora, respectively), many macrobiota also host or facilitate microbial taxa responsible for N transformations. Interest in this topic is expanding, especially as it applies to coastal marine systems where N is a limiting nutrient....
Article
Full-text available
Each winter, populations of striped bass (Morone saxatilis) migrate north from the coastal mid-Atlantic region of the US to the coastal waters of New England. During this migration, striped bass spend significant time in estuaries and saltmarshes, presumably to forage. However, the extent to which saltmarsh productivity supports striped bass remain...
Article
Full-text available
A critical challenge to understanding the response of ecosystems to anthropogenic drivers is characterizing the spatial and temporal variability of controls on food web dynamics. We used a long-term (9 yr) isotope survey and a community metric isotope approach to determine the major physical factors influencing the source of energy to estuarine foo...
Article
Full-text available
Research that uses stable isotope analysis often involves a delay between sample collection in the field and laboratory processing, therefore requiring preservation to prevent or reduce tissue degradation and associated isotopic compositions. Although there is a growing literature describing the effects of various preservation techniques, the resul...
Article
Seagrass meadows are important habitats that serve as nursery, feeding, and sheltering grounds for many marine species. In addition to the ecosystem functions and services they provide, seagrass habitats and associated fauna are commonly observed to have naturally high levels of heterogeneity, making them ideal for the study of ecological patterns...
Article
Full-text available
Site-specific differences were found in consumer isotope values among ten sites examined in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Average δ13C values among sites ranged −21.7 to −15.7 ‰, δ15N ranged <3 ‰: from 9.8 to 11.5 ‰, and δ34S ranged from 5.9 to 18.3 ‰. Isotope variation among these sites provided insight into the ranging habits of bottlenose dolphin...
Article
Full-text available
We evaluated the potential contribution of allochthonous biomass subsidies to the upper trophic levels of offshore food webs in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico (GOM). We made this evaluation considering nitrogen, an essential and often limiting nutrient in coastal ecosystems, to estimate the potential production of within-ecosystem biomass relative...
Article
Full-text available
Seagrass meadows are among the most productive ecosystems in the marine environment. It has been speculated that much of this production is exported to adjacent ecosystems via the movements of organisms. Our study utilized stable isotopes to track seagrass-derived production into offshore food webs in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. We found that...
Article
Full-text available
Stable carbon isotope values of otoliths can provide long-term records of the environmental conditions experienced by fish. However, because otoliths contain carbon from metabolic sources, it is necessary to determine the proportion of metabolically derived carbon to properly interpret otolith delta(13)C values. To evaluate the relative influence o...
Article
Full-text available
To determine the feasibility of using stable isotopes to track diet shifts in wild gag, Mycteroperca microlepis, populations over seasonal timescales, we conducted a repeated measures diet-shift experiment on four adult gag held in the laboratory. Fish were initially fed a diet of Atlantic mackerel, Scomber scombrus, (mean δ13C = −21.3‰ ± 0.2, n = ...
Article
Background/Question/Methods Each winter in the Florida Big Bend Region millions of kilograms of fish and invertebrates migrate from their summer home in the seagrass beds to over-winter and/or spawn as far as 100 Km away on offshore reefs. We hypothesize that this egress constitutes a major flux of carbon and nutrients to offshore food webs. Furt...

Network

Cited By