Patterns in temporal variability of temperature, oxygen and pH along an environmental gradient in a coral reef.

Abstract

Spatial and temporal environmental variability are important drivers of ecological processes at all scales. As new tools allow the in situ exploration of individual responses to fluctuations, ecologically meaningful ways of characterizing environmental variability at organism scales are needed. We investigated the fine-scale spatial heterogeneity of high-frequency temporal variability in temperature, dissolved oxygen concentration, and pH experienced by benthic organisms in a shallow coastal coral reef. We used a spatio-temporal sampling design, consisting of 21 short-term time-series located along a reef flat-to-reef slope transect, coupled to a long-term station monitoring water column changes. Spectral analyses revealed sharp gradients in variance decomposed by frequency, as well as differences between physically-driven and biologically-reactive parameters. These results highlight the importance of environmental variance at organismal scales and present a new sampling scheme for exploring this variability in situ.