Intertidal communities are diverse and productive assemblages, but are under pressure from alien invasive species, resource use, and environmental change. Algoa Bay's island intertidal communities are located in a national park offering unique opportunities for long-term ecological monitoring research, offering insight into these issues.

Cracks and crevices are used by a variety of marine organisms to escape enemies in the short- and long-term. These environments represent unique habitat types that can differ markedly from the surrounding seascape, and may be important to commercial species such as abalone.

Seawater temperature is an important driver of the distribution of marine species. The marine environment, including coastal seawater temperatures, is changing and marine heatwaves becoming more common globally. It is important to understand the effect that these changes might have on our marine macroalgal communities.

It is generally accepted that intertidal biota are afforded some advantage by living in the intertidal zone. It has been shown that many are limited to this harsh environment to avoid competetion or predation in the infratidal. However does the advantage of aerial exposure extend beyond this? The ecophysiology of exposure tolerance in intertidal seaweeds needs to be explored further.

Not unlike herds of antelope which migrate between grazing ranges in the landscape; fish are believed to utilize different portions of the seascape for various purposes or life stages. The seaweed communities, and associated invertebrate fauna, in these patches are probably an important driver for such behaviour, either as food source or refugia.

Coastal (peritidal) freshwater seeps have recently been recognized as biologically unique habitat types which function like small estuaries, albeit on a much smaller spatial and temporal scale. The aquatic vegetation and macroagal flora of these small systems are important in structuring these habitats and are yet to be fully described.