Data from: High-resolution monitoring of Salish Sea estuarine communities through participatory science

Agents of global change, such as climate disruptions, habitat loss, and
biological invasions, affect nearshore and intertidal ecological
communities in acute and chronic ways. Biological monitoring aims to track
the changes in ecological communities over time, yet temporal mismatches
between sampling regimes, environmental stressors, and corresponding
ecological responses of interest often limit the utility of monitoring
data for testing hypotheses related to these changes. Participatory
science, alternatively “citizen science”, can increase the geographic and
temporal scale of monitoring and can be a tool to address this limitation.
By improving statistical power through higher resolution and a larger
scale of data, participatory science programs can detect how global change
alters highly dynamic ecological communities. In this study, we evaluate
insights from a participatory science dataset (Washington Sea Grant Crab
Team) on nearshore mobile epifaunal communities in the Salish Sea, how
they differ across habitat types and over time, and how they responded to
an atmospheric heatwave. Nearshore communities varied across channel,
lagoon, and tideflat habitat types, with community metrics and species
identities aligning with the environmental characteristics of each habitat
type. Though these communities experience high seasonal variability,
habitat type differences were consistent over the seven years of data
collected. While some sites did experience extreme excursions of water
temperature as a result of the 2021 atmospheric heatwave, neither short-
nor long-term impacts were detected in the ecological communities
monitored at the regional scale. Two factors are likely important in this
conclusion: 1. We monitored mobile epifauna, which may be able to migrate
to mitigate extreme events and 2. Water temperatures during the heatwave
rarely exceeded those experienced at the sites during other times of year.
The seasonal variability of the ecological communities observed in these
dynamic environments suggests avoiding snapshot sampling in favor of an
approach that offers high temporal resolution, as some participatory
science programs can, to be able to accurately disentangle effects of
acute stressors from the noise of natural variability.