Landscape parameters of seagrass, fish and macroinvertebrate communities within Artificial Seagrass Units (ASU) in Back Sound, NC from July to September 2018

To parse the ecological effects of habitat area and patchiness on faunal community structure and dynamics of estuarine nekton, we employed artificial seagrass unit (ASU) landscapes at a scale relevant to habitat fidelity of common fish and macroinvertebrates (days to weeks) in this temperate study system.

We designed and deployed 25 unique, 234-square meter landscapes, composed of a total of 2059 1-meter squared ASUs. These landscapes were designed along orthogonal axes of artificial seagrass area (i.e., percent cover of each landscape = 10-60 percent) and fragmentation per se (i.e., percolation probability; 0.1-0.59) to delineate their independent and interactive effects on seagrass fish and macroinvertebrate communities. We also opportunistically examined how initial landscape configurations were altered by a stochastic event (i.e., Hurricane Florence), which affected our landscapes in an analogous fashion to natural seagrass (i.e., uprooting ASUs/rhizomes and burying ASUs/plants under sediments).

Landscape parameters and designs were determined by Dr. Lauren A. Yeager at the Marine Science Institute, of the University of Texas at Austin. Landscape construction was led by Drs. F. Joel Fodrie and Amy H. Yarnall for the Estuarine Ecology Laboratory of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences.