Vital Signs & Climate Change StoryMap Transcripts

What is Long-Term Data?

Sarah Codde:

Long-term data sets really help us see the bigger picture. Being able to monitor animals over a really long time period, you see the ups and downs of their population and you can learn what is the natural variation in their population growth and their pup production year to year. So you know what is the baseline, what is normal change, and then you can then see what is the abnormal change. With the long-term dataset, that's what allows you to do it. Without that, you wouldn't really know when changes are normal or when they're out of the ordinary.

Rocky Intertidal Zones:

Living on the Edge: A Sea Anemone Case Study

Ben Becker:

We as humans, we can live out in the air all the time, but we don't have to live half of our life underwater. And if you're a fish, you can live all of your life underwater, but all the organisms that are in the rocky intertidal need to be able to deal with both. Sometimes huge swings in temperature. Obviously, huge swings in what the humidity or the water content is. They have to worry about drying out. They have to worry about breathing in these two different environments, photosynthesizing in these two different environments. So it's a really good place to study creatures that are living at the edge of what's possible in terms of everything that the waves and the wind and the heat and the cold are throwing at them.
Most of the rocky intertidal organisms have really clever strategies for not drying out when the tide goes away. People are familiar with anemones. When the tide is in and they're underwater, they have their stinging tentacles floating or pulsating in the water, and if anything swims by, it gives them a little sting and then it can bring them in towards its mouth and eat them. When the tide goes out, they're not able to obviously grab things out of the air, so they pull all those tentacles inside their body and they wrap around on the top so you can barely even see that it looks like an anemone, and that keeps them from drying out, and also, it helps keep other potential predators or scavengers from trying to tear apart their somewhat soft bodies.

Mussel Photo Plots & Counts:

Darren Fong:

The fixed plots have been set up back in the late eighties. At these sites, we take photographs with, at that time, a 35 millimeter camera. And more recently, we take pictures using a digital camera. And those images of these fixed plots are then thrown onto a computer where we look at the coverage of different organisms in this fixed area plot. And we can look at changes in percent cover over time. So for example, some of the plots that we choose are ones that have mussels, and we would be able to follow the percentage of mussel coverage in these plots over time.

Sea Star Counts

Darren Fong:

We're counting sea stars at some of our sites, along vertical transects. And so those are transects that stretch from the water's edge going up towards the shoreline, and so we actually count the sea stars and assign them according to the distances along the tapes. So as sea level changes, theoretically we would see the shifts in the sea star occurrences on different transect tapes, presumably moving upward and upslope.

Biodiversity Transects

Darren Fong:

What we've started to do is biodiversity transects. We have 11 transects, which are tape measures stretched from the water's edge to the end of the rocky shoreline. We sample along those transects and get the organisms that are underneath fixed distances along the tape. This technique covers a broad area and we can get a good picture of how organisms are distributed over space.

Mussel Memory: Marine & Terrestrial Heatwaves

Ben Becker:

We had a period in the summer of 2020 with several weeks of extremely hot weather and extremely low tides and also extremely low wave action. So, you know, this happens every once in a while but usually we don’t have these really really long days along the coast coinciding with that. And with climate change, we’re having more and more of these hot days. So in this one particular event with these low tides, low surf splash and water getting on the rocky intertidal, we have these large beds of mussels, which are a mollusk that live in the rocky intertidal and are a foundational species, they provide food for a lot of other rocky intertidal organisms, like sea stars. And these mussels, while they’re adapted to being warm and dry for a few hours of the day, under these circumstances over the period of about a week, they were hot and completely dried out, no surf spray in direct sun in the middle of the day for a couple of days up to a week and it killed large swaths of these mussels. That’s the sort of thing we can expect to see more and more often. Once we have a few good years after that and we don’t have large die offs and large heat events, those mussels can come back and recolonize if the conditions are good. But if we see every year or every other year or every three years these big die-off events, making the habitat much less good for the mussels, we could see those mussel beds declining and maybe being replaced by other rocky intertidal organisms like barnacles that are more resistant to drying out.

Escaping a Rising Sea

Darren Fong:

We have a lot of photo plots that have been monitored since the late 1980s over at our park Golden Gate. A lot of those photo plots that were initially set up were in areas that had, at that time, high densities of the target organisms. So for instance, there were some sites that were set up in areas where we had large numbers of mussels or a type of algae called rockweed. And when you look at it over time, some of those photo plots and their initial communities have actually shifted to other organisms. So now some of our rockweed photo plots have shifted to more of what's called a mixed red algae. It's unclear whether that's due to climate change or just natural variation on our site. There are predictions that sea level rise would cause shifts in the intertidal assemblages, where ones that prefer kind of the splash zone, are higher in the rocky intertidal will kind of move further up slope as sea level rises.

Western Snowy Plovers:

Matt Lau:

I came to love snowy plovers when I went to college at Humboldt State University, where I took a shorebirds conservation class and became so fascinated with snowy plover breeding biology and with how, when the nest hatches, the male becomes the sole caretaker of the chicks while the female goes off and just starts a new nest or finds a new mate. Their breeding biology is just so interesting to me.

Squeezed Between a Plant and a Watery Place

Matt Lau:

In the future, we're definitely going to see, with sea level rise, a reduction in nesting habitat for plovers. So if you combine sea level rise with habitat loss from invasive species like European beach grass and ice plant, it's really squeezing the plovers into a smaller and smaller stretch of beach on both sides. And so that emphasizes how important habitat restoration is for dune ecosystems. So removing all of that beach grass and ice plants can be really beneficial for not just plovers, but for other sensitive enlisted plant species like the Tidestrom's lupine, and the beach layia.

Coho Salmon:

Juveniles: Growing Pains

Mike Reichmuth:

Within our long-term dataset, if we see an anomaly, we can then from that say, "Well, what do we need to do to solve this right now?" So, for instance, if it was a drought, we can then use our data that we have and say, "Okay, the fish are located in this one section. Based off our previous data, we know that that section is going to dry up or not going to be hospitable for the fish over the entire summer. So let's move these fish to a place where it is hospitable, based off our data is going to be good for them for the entire summer." So that's one example that we've actually done in the past. In the case of that one example, all the fish were in that inhospitable area. So we ended up moving all the coho to another location to basically save the entire population for that summer.

Migrating Adults: Trials on the California Current

Mike Reichmuth:

You have what's called coastal upwelling, and upwelling is when you have the nutrient rich cold water that's at the bottom ocean coming up towards the surface. That's why we have such cold water on the West Coast there. It also provides all the food for the fish. Recently we had really warm temperatures and people also noted that the ocean temperatures warmed up quite a bit, like six or seven degrees warmer than normal. In the last heatwave we've had, the upwelling stopped. There was nothing turning over from the bottom.
If that occurs say when they're just leaving like in April or May, then it's not good for them because there's no food for them, so they basically can go out to the ocean and starve, and that has happened to them some years in which the upwelling stopped during their migration out to the ocean.

Plant Communities:

Kelsey Songer:

Plants can stabilize terrain, influence hydrologies, and affect fire regimes. They're an important cultural resource. Yeah, list goes on.

Because they're so integral to all of those ecosystem processes. You can relate changes in plant communities to many different biotic and abiotic parameters.

I'm probably most interested to see how a given vegetation type responds to climate change. There's been a lot of modeling on these very large spatial scales, but there's less of an understanding of how things are going to work on smaller spatial scales. So I'm interested to see how the Doug fir forest changes, versus how a coastal grassland changes, versus a freshwater wetland, because I don't necessarily think they'll all change in the same way.

Our coastal parks, like Golden Gate and Point Reyes, spend a lot of the year in a very heavy layer of fog. How is the fog going to change as the climate warms and how is that going to affect our local microclimate?

Kelsey Songer:

A lot of endemic plant species are restricted to very specific soil types, like serpentine is a big one. Just wondering whether species like that are going to be able to expand beyond those restricted soil types, or if they're going to get stuck in the areas that they can inhabit? In the event that things happen really rapidly, there won't really be enough time for a lot of these plant species to adapt to all these changes, and that could result in them disappearing. If warming is to happen at a slower rate, it's possible that some of them, specifically the endemics, could adapt to occupy different ranges.

Kelsey Songer:

Anecdotally, this last winter was a super wet year, and over the last few months I feel like I've been seeing a lot of species that are new to the plots. It could be that there's a seed bank on the plot that's been there for a while, and with all the rain we got this past year, we're seeing a lot of stuff come up that hasn't been there in a while. And I think the super blooms are a great example of how a really large water event can alter the species composition in a given area. And I think events like the one we had this past winter are going to be more common. It will be interesting to see what that kind of up and down of really wet years and then really dry years does to the plant community composition in a given area.

Landbirds:

Shape Shifters:

Mark Dettling:

The hypothesis is that the effects of climate change in coastal California, which is this kind of mild climate, is not so much a temperature increase, and that change in temperature maybe isn't a driving factor. Maybe the driving factor is the change in the extreme weather events. So longer, drier droughts or larger, more violent storms, and maybe for surviving those extreme events, being a larger individual is more advantageous, and so that is potentially driving birds to become slightly larger over the decades.

Late to the Feast:

Mark Dettling:

The question is whether or not they're able to shift their migration timing as fast as the timing of the resources are changing up here. So it's good to see that some of the species are able to respond, but it's just a question of whether or not they're kind of responding quickly enough. If spring's happening a week early and they're only able to shift their timing by a day over the course of 10 years, then that difference in timing might start causing problems for those birds arriving here in the area.

Pinnipeds:

Sarah Codde:

Both harbor seals and elephant seals are pretty sensitive to changes in their environment, so they respond quickly to those changes, which helps us understand the current conditions of the marine environment. They're both giving us insights to different aspects of the marine ecosystem, so harbor seals being more near shore, elephant seals being more offshore. With harbor seals, they're actually the only year round resident that's a marine mammal. And Point Reyes in particular is very important to harbor seals. This area is actually the largest concentration of harbor seals in California. It's really giving us a good idea of how the bigger population is doing, since it's such a large concentration right here in Point Reyes and kind of the surrounding area of Marin County. For elephant seals, there's only a handful of places in the world where elephant seals come on shore to give birth to breed and molt, and Point Reyes is one of those. There are so few places where they're coming on shore, and so only a few places where we can actually learn about them.

Population Counts:

Sarah Codde:

We do population counts, so we're going out to all the sites that they breed at and molt at, and we're using binoculars or spotting scopes to count them. For elephant seals, we actually can classify them based off their age class, because there's a lot of differences between each age group. Whereas for harbor seals, they're a little bit harder. We basically can only tell if it's a pup or not a pup.

Tagging:

Sarah Codde:

Specifically for elephant seals, we're also applying a small plastic tag to their rear flippers. And each tag has a different alphanumeric code on it, so then we can track those individuals over time, so we know where that animal was born because we're only tagging the weaned pups. We know where the animal was born, when it was born, and then, when we see it, year after year, when we see that tag, we can know, did it go to a different site? If it's a female, did she give birth? Did she successfully wean her pup? So we can learn a lot more about individuals off of that little plastic tag.

Disturbance Monitoring:

Sarah Codde:

For harbor seals, the additional monitoring we do with them is disturbance monitoring. Harbor seals are very, very skittish, they're very timid, and so we're monitoring those disturbances that happen to them. And that could be natural. Sometimes landslides or coyotes or birds cause a disturbance to the seals.

But then we're also monitoring the human source of disturbance, so hikers, tide poolers, people on kayaks, people on boats. And so we're monitoring how the seals react to those sources. They might just do a head alert, which basically means they're just lifting up their head and they're alarmed by something. So that's kind of the first sign that something's going on that they might be disturbed. And then their next movement is if they start shifting around on the beach or whatever substrate they're on. And then kind of the extreme is if they actually go into the water, so we call that a flush into water, when they retreat into the water to try to get away from whatever was causing the disturbance.

So we're monitoring what kind of reaction they have, and then we also monitor how long it takes them to come back onto shore after they've gone into the water.

Downsides of a Dual Life:

Sarah Codde:

With climate change, a big concern for elephant seals is this increasing air temperature and solar radiation.

That blubber does a really good job of retaining heat and so when they're on land, there is that concern that they could overheat. Are they able to release enough heat through that really thick blubber layer?
And especially during the breeding season when females with pups are really staying out of the water because the pups can't swim. Ff an animal gets too hot, normally it would just go to the water to cool off but moms and pups can't really do that and so there is a concern, especially with pups can get pretty large at the end of their nursing period; a weaned pup could be about 300 pounds that month after it's born, and again, it's not a good swimmer at that time so it's on land for most of the time and so there's a lot of concern in the future for elephant seals overheating because that blubber is so thick, and because of the changing air temperature.

Sarah Codde:

One of the biggest concerns for climate change with pinnipeds is sea level rise, and so that is going to affect their habitat on land. Pinnipeds are tied to the land. They have to come on shore a few times a year. And so with sea level rise, that could destroy some of their areas.
Climate change effects are very hard to predict and are a little bit unknown because part of that could be that it opens up some new habitat. We don't know. It could change it in a way that it opens up a habitat that pinnipeds can't go to right now. But more likely is that more of the area is going to be inundated with water, which is going to reduce their habitat.

So elephant seals, their pups can't swim at birth, so sea level rise is going to be really important to them. So we're going to have to be concerned about what areas are elephant seals going to be able to safely have their pups where they can stay away from the water. Harbor seals are a little bit better off so their pups can swim at birth, so they're going to have more options for where they can move to with sea level rise.
The other issues are an increase in El Ninos and storm activity. There can be more storm activity during El Ninos, so stronger storms means more storm surge, which means more water on shore. So again, that's kind of reducing their habitat.

Moving Northward:

Sarah Codde:

For elephant seals, their population continues to increase every year. Every year it's interesting to see how much is the population going to increase this time. So there's still the concern of what climate change effects will have on elephant seals, but currently they're doing really well. And one of the reasons our population is increasing is that animals are moving north. The bulk of the elephant seal population is more in Southern California around the channel islands, but over time, which could be climate change related, elephant seals are moving north. It could be due to warming temperatures, so warming air temperature and warming ocean water temperature. That could be part of it. And so right now, maybe climate change effects are having our population increase. Time will tell what happens with that.

What Can You Do?

Protect Pinnipeds:

Sarah Codde:

We talked about how sea level rise is really affecting their habitat and where they haul out, and so being able to protect those areas is really helpful for them. When extremes happen, like big storms and it pushes the seals around, we need to be able to let them go to new areas to get out of that storm surge, and then have people respect those beach closures, which are temporary.

Sarah Codde:

We ask people to stay at a minimum 300 feet away from harbor seals, and that helps maintain their energy. It helps them successfully nurse their pups. If they were constantly disturbed and retreating into the water, then that takes a lot of their energy, and it possibly separates moms and pups, which could lead to a pup dying, or at a minimum, it leads to less time that the mom and pup are bonding and nursing.

Prevent “Plant Blindness”

Kelsey Songer:

I like to encourage people to take a closer look at the things around you. If you're able to get out there and just take a closer look, I think it does shift your perspective a little bit, and it's an easy way to just start thinking about the natural world.

Restore Rocky Intertidal Zones:

Ben Becker:

Thinking about the rocky intertidal as this really limited, restricted habitat in California, and even though it's going for a thousand miles up and down the coast, in the width of it, in some places it's a couple of feet wide, but it's generally a pretty small habitat. I think keeping that in mind that, oh, this is a cool place to go.