ITRS 2025

Pippa Moore

celine — 2025-03-19T09:11:51Z

Pippa Moore is Professor of Marine Science at Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.

Pip is a marine community ecologist whose research investigates the structure, function and ecosystem services provided by shallow-water benthic ecosystems. She also undertakes research into green engineering tools, kelp restoration and climate change ecology. Perhaps uniquely placed to provide this talk, Pip started out in the early 2000's as a staunch limpet tickler, but has over the years has migrated beneath the waves to become a kelp lover where she has spent much of the last 10+ years swimming around the kelp forests of the UK, Chile and Peru. Pip has been to every ITRS since Christchurch 2003 where she fell in love with the relaxed, dysfunctional family like atmosphere and the fact that there is a session when you are allowed to drink beer.

Presentation:

International Temperate Reefs Symposium: Genesis, Ethos and Evolution

Louise B Firth¹, Pippa Moore²
¹University College Cork, Ireland - ²University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

The International Temperate Reefs Symposium (ITRS) was founded in 1990 as a response to the fact that temperate reef ecology wasn't really being represented in the global conference scene—especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Initially a small, informal gathering of researchers primarily from Australasia and North America, it aimed to create a space for those studying temperate reefs to exchange ideas, share stories, and enjoy a pint together. Over the years, though, the conference has grown, and so has the research. It's often been said that ITRS used to be conference about limpets, but now it's a conference about kelp. In this talk, not only will we will look back at the origins and evolution of the symposium, but we will formally test the hypothesis that the conference has undergone a catastrophic phase shift and that the focus of the conference has indeed shifted over time. We will do this by sampling abstracts from past conferences to see how the themes have evolved. Looking to the future, we will also discuss how the spirit of ITRS—its inclusivity, its support for students and early-career researchers, and its focus on camaraderie—can continue to evolve as the conference moves forward.

Louise Firth

celine — 2025-03-19T09:00:05Z

Louise Firth is a Senior Lecturer at University College Cork, Ireland.

Louise is a marine ecologist who works in both natural and artificial coastal environments. She is interested in the relationship between humans and coastal ecosystems and how this relationship has changed over time. While much of her recent research focuses on developing novel ways of making space for nature in human-dominated environments, perhaps her true passion is LIMPETS. Over the past 10 years she have made it her mission to "fly the flag for limpets”. Having attended every ITRS conference since Santa Barbara 2006 (except Adelaide 2008), she collaborates widely with the ITRS community and considers them her academic family.

Presentation:

International Temperate Reefs Symposium: Genesis, Ethos and Evolution

Louise B Firth¹, Pippa Moore²
¹University College Cork, Ireland - <sup>2University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

Steve J. Hawkins

celine — 2025-02-26T09:34:30Z

Steve Hawkins is Emeritus Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Southampton and physically based at the Marine Biological Association of the UK, Plymouth as a Lankester Research Fellow.

Steve has worked on rocky shores since 1975. He and his students have used them as tractable systems for experimental ecology and as sentinels for detecting responses of marine biodiversity to global change and its interaction with regional and local scale impacts via maintenance of long-term and repeating broadscale surveys. He has also worked on limpet fisheries, eco-engineering of sea defences, recovery and restoration of coastal ecosystems, especially in urbanised areas. He still does over 50 days of field surveys each year despite very creaky knees.

Presentation:

In the footsteps of giants: homage to the French founders of intertidal ecology

Steve Hawkins^1,2, Nova Mieszkowska^1,3, Louise Firth⁴, Ana Luisa Mano⁵, Fernando Lima⁵, Dominique Davoult⁶, Amelia Curd⁷, Stan Dubois ⁷

¹Marine Biological Association, UK - ²University of Southampton, UK - ³University of Liverpool, UK - ⁴ University College Cork, Ireland - ⁵ CIBIO, Portugal - ⁶ Sorbonne Université, Station Biologique Roscoff, France - ⁷ IFREMER, France

It is fitting that ITRS returns this year to France, the birthplace in Europe of rocky shore ecology. The work of the early giants is revisited to remind a largely anglophone and search-engine driven audience of their lasting value. Early descriptive ecology of rocky shores started at the beginning of the 19th Century in North-west France (e.g., Audouin and Milne-Edwards). Some of the first experimental studies commenced in France in the early 20th century (Hariot), exploring the processes shaping patterns on rocky shores, with much progress up to World War II (e.g., Fischer-Piette and Hatton). Broadscale biogeographic surveys, initially linked to taxonomic collecting, commenced in the 1930s and were well underway in the 1940s and 1950s (Fischer-Piette and colleagues including Crisp). Most of this fieldwork was on the North-west and Western coasts of France with occasional trans-manche forays. Researchers took advantage of a network of marine laboratories along the Channel and Atlantic Coasts, particularly in Brittany and down to the Basque Country. Surveys extended from Calais, around France and along the Iberian Peninsula down to the then French colonies in North Africa. These surveys provide a superb baseline against which to measure responses to climate fluctuations and recent anthropogenic climate change. The role of the wider “Celtic Fringe” in following in the footsteps of work commenced in Breizh is alluded to briefly. Post-war pioneering work on reef-forming sabellarians (Gruet) and contemporary follow-up work (led by our hosts) is outlined. Attention is also drawn to some more recent research on functional ecology of rocky reefs in Brittany.

Steve Hawkins doing fieldwork on the Isle of Wight 2024

Anne Salomon

jeanmarie — 2024-06-24T13:08:13Z

Anne Salomon is a Professor of Applied Marine Ecology and Social-Ecological System Science at Simon Fraser University's School of Resource and Environmental Management.

Her goal is to discover what makes the relationships between people and other components of coastal ocean ecosystems resilient to disturbances.
She and her students combine manipulative field experiments, quantitative models, and archeological reconstructions with Indigenous knowledge to reveal nature's mysteries and inform ecologically resilient and socially just ocean policies.

Presentation:

Supporting the Resilience of Canada's Pacific Kelp Forests

Anne Salomon
Simon Fraser University, Canada

The future of Canada's Pacific kelp forests lies at the nexus of extreme and incremental climate disturbances, predator recovery, a burgeoning blue economy, and a dynamic policy landscape, both locally and globally. For over a decade, we have been working in collaboration with Indigenous and state governments, natural and social scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and fishermen to reveal the social-ecological relationships that underpin the resilience of these high latitude underwater forests. By bringing western and Indigenous knowledge systems into conversation, we have found that kelps are surprisingly resilient to moderate magnitudes of harvest, yet their recovery rates are highly sensitive to even slight increases in sea surface temperature. The hidden impacts of climate change however are more insidious. Kelp forest susceptibility to epiphytic bryozoan outbreaks increases with warmer ocean temperatures and higher kelp density yet decreases with greater wave exposure. Moreover, all these dynamics are playing out amid changing predator abundances, societal norms, and policies supporting the rights and responsibilities of coastal Indigenous Nations. Fortunately, proactive and equitable climate solutions exist, including selecting cooler, more wave-exposed harvest sites, reducing and shifting the timing of harvest in warmer years, and experimenting with mariculture activities that attend to the multidimensional objectives of local communities. Many of these strategies reflect ancestral Indigenous practices, values, and laws which govern human-environment relationships. As countries worldwide develop blue economy policies and climate solutions, these results emphasize that kelp forest resilience can be supported by taking a social-ecological systems approach, considering nested scales of governance, co-producing knowledge, and considering local contexts and objectives amid global influences.

Melanie Bishop

jeanmarie — 2024-06-24T13:08:13Z

Melanie Bishop is Professor of Marine Ecology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Her benthic ecological research addresses how coastal ecosystems operate and respond to change. In particular, her work has developed a new understanding of how habitat-forming species promote biodiversity, ecosystem function and resilience of ecosystems to environmental stress.
She has used this understanding to innovate new approaches to ecological restoration and to the environmentally sustainable design of marine constructions.

She is co-leader of the award-winning Living Seawalls program and was co-leader of the Green Engineering Group of the World Harbour Project.

Presentation:

Habitat by design: a toolkit for the nature repair of urbanised coasts

Prof Melanie Bishop,
School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University NSW 2109 Australia

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework sets the global target of restoring 30% of degraded marine habitats by 2030. This represents a particular challenge for estuarine and coastal areas where close to complete extirpation of functional ecosystems has left little foundation for repairing habitats or where the concentration of human population can introduce significant human-use conflict. Nature repair along urbanised coasts therefore requires novel solutions that blend traditional approaches to ecological restoration with nature-based solutions, conservation aquaculture and the eco-engineering of artificial habitats into marine constructions. In this talk I will overview how these various approaches to nature repair can be effectively implemented and blended along urban coastlines to reinstate native biodiversity and its important functions and services whilst simultaneously providing for sustainable human use. I will provide examples of how key processes influencing ecosystem establishment such as self-facilitation, niche construction and sensory ecology, have been integrated into nature repair projects utilising both natural and artificial substrates. I will also overview how standards developed to guide evidence-based and scientifically rigorous ecological restoration can be applied to eco-engineering and nature-based solutions to ensure they achieve tangible environmental benefits. In many instances nature has come up with the optimal design, and by looking to the structure and function of remnant ecosystems we can design and build robust foundations for reinstating nature.

Brian Helmuth

jeanmarie — 2024-06-24T13:08:13Z

Brian Helmuth is a Professor at the Marine Science Center at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, with appointments in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs.

Brian's research and teaching focus on ecological forecasting in coastal ecosystems including coral reefs and rocky intertidal systems, with the goal of informing policy and conservation using a range of approaches including physiology, field manipulations and environmental sensing.
A key feature of his work is how human perceptions of environmental change can in many cases serve as barriers to understanding how non-human species are experiencing impacts.

He is also Chief Scientist for Fabien Cousteau's Proteus underwater habitat, envisioned as the International Space Station of the seafloor. Brian currently serves as an author on the 1st U.S. National Nature Assessment.

Presentation:

Thinking like a non-human: Escaping anthropocentric constraints to better understand and predict the impacts of environmental change in coastal ecosystems

Brian Helmuth, Catie Nielson, Angela Jones, Daria Healey and John D. Coley
Northeastern University, Boston, MA and Proteus Ocean Group, New York, NY

As humans, we view the world in ways that are fundamentally at odds with how the vast majority of nonhuman organisms experience the same conditions, a consequence of anthropocentrism (centering one's perception of the natural world on humans) that often goes unrecognized. Weather and oceanographic conditions that we perceive as benign can in fact expose some animals and plants to extreme conditions, and vice versa. This not only affects our ability to effectively design and implement experiments in the field and lab to understand how climate change affects marine organisms, but can also influence decision making of how we use that information to implement conservation strategies.

In order to fully understand how our rapidly changing climate affects nonhuman plants and animals, we need tools such as biophysics and ecomechanics to “translate” environmental conditions at the level of organisms to drivers of physiology which then influence ecological and even biogeographic processes. Such approaches are also vital for designing the way we monitor environmental conditions and even how we manipulate and store data. Using case studies from coral and temperate reefs, and rocky intertidal systems, I'll offer case studies of how biophysical techniques provide a window into how environmental change affects patterns ranging from hyperlocal to biogeographic

Ultimately, however, science remains a human endeavor and we as scientists are subject to the same biases and assumptions that plague the rest of our species, including how we think about nature and human-nature connections, especially in the ocean. Using a cognitive science approach centered on understanding perceptions of nature and in particular marine environments among students in environmental science and other disciplines, I'll explore how we can potentially use that understanding to enhance systems thinking processes that better enable “thinking like a non-human.”

Gray A. Williams

jeanmarie — 2024-06-24T13:08:13Z

Despite starting his research career in the UK, Gray has been working in non-temperate intertidal systems for the last 35 years being based at the Swire Institute of Marine Science, The University of Hong Kong. He has held visiting Professor/Researcher positions in Florence University, Italy; UNIFESP, Brazil; Northeastern University, USA and Xiamen University, China.

His work concentrates on rocky shores in SE Asia, focusing on thermal stress and its impact on the behaviour and physiology of high shore species with reference to geographic patterns (working from northern China to Singapore) and potential impacts of climate change.

Presentation:

Searching for enlightenment: what can we learn from watching marine gastropods?

Gray A Williams
The Swire Institute of Marine Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong SAR, PR China

Traditionally temperate reef biologists grounded their science in field-based observations and manipulations driven by scientific curiosity, much of which stimulated ecological theory. More recently, as the field of biology has evolved, we have seen a shift to embrace new approaches and a focus on meeting the challenges posed by anthropogenic impacts. It is, however, important not to forget traditional approaches and to integrate laboratory, modelling and field based methods. Here, using three case studies, the importance of quantitative field observations, integrated with ecological models and physiological laboratory experiments, are used to illustrate this approach. Using studies on limpets in Europe and the tropics, spatial and temporal variation in activity patterns illustrate highly plastic patterns; which models suggest can be related to minimizing risk and maximizing favourable environmental conditions. When linked to more fixed physiological responses (lethal and non lethal thermal limits) the importance of behavioural thermoregulation seen in tropical limpets and littorinids further illustrates local acclimation between populations; at both small (between shore) and large (latitudinal scales). These plastic behavioural responses mediate the effective physiological limits of species and can inform predictions of how species may respond to climate warming. Unravelling these interactions, however, requires the incorporation of smaller scale assessments to better inform larger scale models, indicating there is still a lot to be learnt from simply watching marine gastropods …