Species percent cover from species resilience and recovery experiments in the rocky intertidal zone of the Oregon Coast from 2011 to 2024

This dataset contains percent cover of species identified from photographs during a species resilience and recovery experiment in the rocky intertidal zone of the Oregon Coast from 2011 to 2024.

Experiment/Study abstract:
Climate change threatens to destabilize ecological communities, potentially moving them from persistently occupied "basins of attraction" to different states. Increasing variation in key ecological processes can signal impending state shifts in ecosystems. In a rocky intertidal meta-ecosystem consisting of three distinct regions spread across 260 km of the Oregon coast, we measured % cover of sessile spaceholders over time (2011-2024) in undisturbed and annually cleared plots. We show that annually cleared plots are characterized by communities that exhibit signs of increasing destabilization (loss of resilience) over the past decade despite persistent community states. In all cases, recovery rates slowed and became more variable over time. The conditions underlying these shifts appear to be external to the system, with thermal disruptions (e.g., marine heat waves, El Niño–Southern Oscillation) and shifts in ocean currents (e.g., upwelling) being the likely proximate drivers. Although this iconic ecosystem has long appeared resistant to stress, the evidence suggests that subtle destabilization has occurred over at least the last decade.