Kimberly A Selkoe

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

Conservation of ecological communities requires deepening our understanding of genetic diversity patterns and drivers at community-wide scales. Here, we use seascape genetic analysis of a diversity metric, allelic richness (AR), for 47 reef species sampled across 13 Hawaiian Islands to empirically demonstrate that large reefs high in coral cover ha...

As climatic changes and human uses intensify, resource managers and other decision makers are taking actions to either avoid or respond to ecosystem tipping points, or dramatic shifts in structure and function that are often costly and hard to reverse. Evidence indicates that explicitly addressing tipping points leads to improved management outcome...

Human pressures on the ocean are thought to be increasing globally, yet we know little about their patterns of cumulative change, which pressures are most responsible for change, and which places are experiencing the greatest increases. Managers and policymakers require such information to make strategic decisions and monitor progress towards manag...

What shapes variation in genetic structure within a community of co-distributed species is a central but difficult question for the field of population genetics. With a focus on the isolated coral reef ecosystem of the Hawaiian Archipelago, we assessed how life history traits influence population genetic structure for 35 reef animals. Despite the a...

Although seafood is the most highly traded food internationally, it is an often overlooked component of global food security. It provides essential local food, livelihoods, and export earnings. Although global capture fisheries production is unlikely to increase, aquaculture is growing considerably. Sustaining seafood's contributions to food securi...

Landscape genomics is a rapidly advancing research field that combines population genomics, landscape ecology, and spatial analytical techniques to explicitly quantify the effects of environmental heterogeneity on neutral and adaptive genetic variation and underlying processes. Landscape genomics has tremendous potential for addressing fundamental...

Land-based source pollutants (LBSP) actively threaten coral reef ecosystems globally. To achieve the greatest conservation outcome at the lowest cost, managers could benefit from appropriate tools that evaluate the benefits (in terms of LBSP reduction) and costs of implementing alternative land management strategies. Here we use a spatially explici...

The growing threats to biodiversity and global alteration of habitats and species distributions make it increasingly necessary to consider evolutionary patterns in conservation decision-making. Yet there is no clear-cut guidance on how genetic features can be incorporated into conservation planning processes, with multiple molecular markers and sev...

Seascape genetics, a term coined in 2006, is a fast growing area of population genetics that draws on ecology, oceanography and geography to address challenges in basic understanding of marine connectivity and applications to management. We provide an accessible overview of the latest developments in seascape genetics that merge exciting new ideas...

Scientists and resources managers often use methods and tools that assume ecosystem components respond linearly to environmental drivers and human stressor. However, a growing body of literature demonstrates that many relationships are non-linear, where small changes in a driver prompt a disproportionately large ecological response. Here we aim to...

Scientists and resource managers often use methods and tools that assume ecosystem components respond linearly to environmental drivers and human stressors. However, a growing body of literature demonstrates that many relationships are non-linear, where small changes in a driver prompt a disproportionately large ecological response. We aim to provi...

In the face of growing human impacts on ecosystems, scientists and managers recognize the need to better understand thresholds and non-linear dynamics in ecological systems to help set management targets. However, our understanding of the factors that drive threshold dynamics, and when and how rapidly thresholds will be crossed is currently limited...

In this chapter we start by describing the dominant waterscape features of marine and freshwater environ­ments and key biological characteristics of aquatic organisms that are most relevant to the design and analysis of waterscape genetic studies. Then we provide examples from the literature that represent a range of research questions and methodol...

The scale and scope of human impacts on abundance and connectivity differ among terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems. Terrestrial landscape genetics is motivated by a need to protect remaining dispersal corridors or mitigate increasing human land development. This chapter starts by describing the dominant waterscape features of marine and fr...

Scientists and resources managers often use methods and tools that assume ecosystem components respond linearly to environmental drivers and human stressor. However, a growing body of literature demonstrates that many relationships are non-linear, where small changes in a driver prompt a disproportionately large ecological response. Here we aim to...

Genetic diversity affects ecological functioning, adaptive capacity and extinction risk (1). Consequently, conservation strategies often call for preserving areas of high genetic diversity (2). Yet we know little about what drives landscape patterns of genetic diversity and how patterns vary across species in an ecosystem. Shared physical and ecolo...

Ecosystem‐based management of coral reef fisheries aims to sustainably deliver a diverse portfolio of ecosystem services. This goal can be undermined if the ecosystem shifts into a different state, with altered ecosystem functions and benefits to people. If levels of drivers that cause transitions between states are identified, management measures...

An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intr...

An important knowledge gap in ocean management is understanding quantitatively how ecosystem components respond to natural and anthropogenic stressors. A common assumption is that stressor-response relationships are linear. However, a growing body of literature demonstrates that many relationships are nonlinear, where small changes in a stressor pr...

Background/Question/Methods A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that marine ecosystems around the world experience abrupt and dramatic regime shifts. These ecosystem-level shifts have important implications for ocean management as they are often unforeseen, can be rapid, large, and difficult to reverse and have direct impacts on people...

In March 2012, the authors met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, North Carolina, USA, to discuss approaches and cooperative ventures in Indo-Pacific phylogeography. The group emerged with a series of findings: (1) Marine population structure is complex, but single locus mtDNA studies continue to provide powerful fir...

Targeted conservation and management programs are crucial for mitigating anthropogenic threats to declining biodiversity. Although evolutionary processes underpin extant patterns of biodiversity, it is uncommon for resource managers to explicitly consider genetic data in conservation prioritization. Genetic information is inherently relevant to man...

In the past decade, the study of dispersal of marine organisms has shifted from focusing predominantly on the larval stage to a recent interest in adult movement. Antitropical distributions provide a unique system to assess vagility and dispersal. In this study, we have focused on an antitropical wrasse genus, Semicossyphus, which includes the Cali...

We present a novel method for designing marine reserves that trades off three important attributes of a conservation plan: habitat condition, habitat representation, and socioeconomic costs. We calculated habitat condition in four ways, using different human impacts as a proxy for condition: all impacts; impacts that cannot be managed with a reserv...

We combine kinship estimates with traditional F-statistics to explain contemporary drivers of population genetic differentiation despite high gene flow. We investigate range-wide population genetic structure of the California spiny (or red rock) lobster (Panulirus interruptus) and find slight, but significant global population differentiation in mt...

The ability of marine protected areas (MPAs) to provide protection from indirect stressors, via increased resilience afforded by decreased impact from direct stressors, remains an important and unresolved question about the role MPAs can play in broader conservation and resource management goals. Over a five-year period, we evaluated coral and fish...

Relationships between pairs of species groups. (DOCX)

List of taxa encountered during our quantitative surveys. Fish trophic groups: AP = Apex Predators, CA = Carnivores, Pl = Planktivores, He = Herbivores. (DOCX)

List and geographic coordinates of sampling sites. (DOCX)

Cumulative human impact source data and analysis. (DOC)

Historical exploitation of the Mediterranean Sea and the absence of rigorous baselines makes it difficult to evaluate the current health of the marine ecosystems and the efficacy of conservation actions at the ecosystem level. Here we establish the first current baseline and gradient of ecosystem structure of nearshore rocky reefs at the Mediterran...

More than 38% of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coast, and the coastal zone is becoming more heavily populated each year (Small and Cohen 2004). More and more human activities depend upon and compete for coastal and marine ecosystem goods and services. This intensification of use is necessitating a shift toward more comprehensive...

Understanding connectivity remains a fundamental challenge to marine ecology due to technical limitations of tracking larval dispersal. Marine population genetic analyses are often used to make inferences about the scale of population connectivity. For species with a larval phase, pelagic larval duration (PLD) is assumed to influence scale of conne...

Marine species frequently show weak and/or complex genetic structuring that is commonly dismissed as 'chaotic' genetic patchiness and ecologically uninformative. Here, using three datasets that individually feature weak chaotic patchiness, we demonstrate that combining inferences across species and incorporating environmental data can greatly impro...

As resource management and conservation efforts move toward multi-sector, ecosystem-based approaches, we need methods for comparing the varying responses of ecosystems to the impacts of human activities in order to prioritize management efforts, allocate limited resources, and understand cumulative effects. Given the number and variety of human act...

Management and conservation can be greatly informed by considering explicitly how environmental factors influence population genetic structure. Using simulated larval dispersal estimates based on ocean current observations, we demonstrate how explicit consideration of frequency of exchange of larvae among sites via ocean advection can fundamentally...

Microsatellite sequences were isolated from both non-enriched and enriched genomic libraries of California spiny lobster, Panulirus interruptus. Eight consistently amplifying, scorable and polymorphic loci were characterized for 79 individuals collected at Santa Cruz and San Clemente Islands, California, and tested for cross-species amplification i...

Materials and methods details for the sources and treatment of GIS data to create the ecozone maps and individual threat maps used to build the cumulative impact map

Map of the shallow water (<200 m) ecosystem designations that were used in the global model. Large amounts of soft bottom, “rocky reef,” and very little coral reef area result in a poor estimate of cumulative impacts of anthropogenic threats on atolls and banks in the NWHI with this model. The “quick fix” version of the global model reclassified th...

Coastal marine ecosystems rank among the most productive ecosystems on earth but are also highly threatened by the exposure to both ocean- and land-based human activities. Spatially explicit information on the distributions of land-based impacts is critical for managers to identify where the effects of land-based activities on ecosystem condition a...

Quantitative assessment of the spatial patterns of all human uses of the oceans and their cumulative effects is needed for implementing ecosystem-based management, marine protected areas, and ocean zoning. Here, we apply methods developed to map cumulative impacts globally to the California Current using more comprehensive and higher-quality data f...

absorbing, and emitting oxygen and carbon dioxide. Ocean and coastal ecosystems provide water purification and waste treatment, land protec-tion, nutrient cycling, and pharmaceutical, energy, and min-eral resources. Further, more than 89 million Americans and millions more around the world participate in marine recre-ation each year. As coastal pop...

Keywords Mendelian Microsatellite Mitochondrial Paralabrax SerranidaeWhile molecular tools have transformed fisheries biology,their development and implementation can necessitate theuse of delicate equipment, be expensive, and requireextensive optimization [1]. Counting only consumables, wehave calculated that in-house sequencing of 500–700 baseson...

Effective and comprehensive regional-scale marine conservation requires fine-grained data on the spatial patterns of threats and their overlap. To address this need for the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (Monument) in Hawaii, USA, spatial data on 14 recent anthropogenic threats specific to this region were gathered or created, including...

Eleven microsatellites were characterized for Semicossyphus pulcher (California sheephead) using an enrichment protocol. The number of alleles varied from three to 14 for a sample of 40 individuals from two populations. Expected heterozygosities ranged from 0.311 to 0.891. All loci but one were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. No evidence for linkage...

Molecular tools perform at their best when integrated with other data and approaches. The value of integrating approaches is especially high when the underlying genetic signal is relatively weak, as occurs in many marine species. Recently, studies combining genetic, oceanographic, behavioural and modelling approaches have provided new insights into...

Every manager must assess and prioritize anthropogenic impacts on their management area from a long list of threats, but data which allow comparison of the relative ecological impacts of threats for decision‐making is often unavailable. This study employed a systematic and standardized method to collect and quantitatively synthesize expert opinion...

Halpern et al. (Reports, 15 February 2008, p. 948) integrated spatial data on 17 drivers of change in the oceans to map the global distribution of human impact. Although fishery catches are a dominant driver, the data reflect activity while impacts occur at different space and time scales. Failure to account for this spatial disconnection could lea...

Our results provide an important first step toward a full assessment of how human activities act cumulatively to affect the condition of the oceans. Fisheries (and climate change) impacts are some of the hardest to map and measure accurately. Consequently, species-specific considerations and fine-scale analyses should be left to more nuanced region...

The management and conservation of the world's oceans require synthesis of spatial data on the distribution and intensity of human activities and the overlap of their impacts on marine ecosystems. We developed an ecosystem-specific, multiscale spatial model to synthesize 17 global data sets of anthropogenic drivers of ecological change for 20 marin...

A panel of 64 experts ranked 30 scenarios of human activities according to their impacts on coastal ecosystems. Experts were asked to rank the five scenarios posing the greatest threats and the five scenarios posing the least threats. The goal of this study was to find weights for criteria that adequately model these stakeholders’ preferences and c...

The California sheephead Semicossyphus pulcher and the kelp bass Paralabrax clathratus are members of a suite of nearshore reef species that have subtropical taxonomic affiliations and important fisheries in the Southern California Bight (SCB). This suite shows high interannual fluctuation in recruitment success in the SCB, with no known cause. One...

Marine ecosystems are threatened by a suite of anthropogenic stressors. Mitigating multiple threats is a daunting task, particularly when funding constraints limit the number of threats that can be addressed. Threats are typically assessed and prioritized via expert opinion workshops that often leave no record of the rationale for decisions, making...

We show that globally declining fisheries catch trends cannot be explained by random processes and are consistent with declining stock abundance trends. Future projections are inherently uncertain but may provide a benchmark against which to assess the effectiveness of conservation measures. Marine reserves and fisheries closures are among those me...