Anthropogenic Impacts to Coastal Habitats
Coastal habitats have suffered immense disturbance due to high population concentrations. These disturbances have lead to altered habitat structure, generally with lost ecological function.
We are interested in how disturbance and/or loss impacts the habitats themselves and also the species that rely upon coastal habitats—some of which provide support to fishes and invertebrates with commercial value.
Dr. Sobocinski's Master’s research (Sobocinski et al. 2010), dissertation research (Sobocinski et al. 2013, Sobocinski and Latour 2015, and Sobocinski and Latour submitted), and post-doc work on flatfish on the Oregon coastal shelf (Sobocinski et al. 2018) and salmon in the Salish Sea (Sobocinski et al. 2017) evaluated aspects of anthropogenic disturbance.
For her dissertation work, she focused on the effects of increasing seawater temperature, which is a stressor for eelgrass in Chesapeake Bay. By generating scenarios and running model simulations, she incorporated this localized impact of global climate change into ecosystem and production models to determine impacts at the community and species level, respectively. Identifying impacts aids in initiating conservation and restoration efforts where they are needed most.
Our current work on salmon in the Salish Sea is aimed at identifying indicators for salmon marine survival. Anthropogenic impacts from hatchery management to coastal development likely reduce survival. Coupled with changing ocean conditions from climate change as well as natural variation the conditions that lead to better- or worse-than-average survival are unknown. Dr. Sobocinski and collaborators are developing a suite of ecosystem indicators and using hypotheses related to life histories and statistical models to evaluate various factors.