Data from: The dynamics of open populations: integration of top–down, bottom–up and supply‐side influences on intertidal oysters

Most communities are structured not by a single process but by some
combination of top–down, bottom–up and supply‐side (i.e. juvenile
recruitment) factors. However, establishing how multiple processes
interact remains a fundamental challenge. For example, the recruitment,
growth, and mortality of estuarine species can vary along the steep and
numerous environmental and biological gradients typical of these habitats,
but the relative importance of those gradients is generally unknown. We
took a novel approach to this question by coupling long‐term field
observations of the Olympia oyster Ostrea lurida in a central California
estuary with a state‐space integral projection model. This approach
revealed that the most parsimonious description of oyster population
dynamics involved spatial variation in growth and adult mortality – but
not juvenile mortality – as well as spatiotemporal variation in
recruitment. These patterns match the available short‐term estimates of
each of those processes from field studies, and reveal a synthetic view of
oyster population dynamics. Larval recruitment has an interannual ‘boom
and bust’ pattern, and during good recruitment years most larvae settle in
the inner bay where water residence time is highest. Adult oyster
mortality is also highest in the inner bay, where several invasive
predators are abundant and lowest in the mid‐bay, where oyster growth is
greatest (due to bottom–up factors), likely leading to a size refuge from
native predators. Surprisingly, juvenile mortality was constant across the
bay, possibly because of a lack of size refuge from native and invasive
predators. Our research approach represents an important advance in
disentangling the contributions of spatio–temporal variation in top–down,
bottom–up and supply‐side forces to the dynamics of populations with open
recruitment.