004: A Dynamic Bayesian Network model for predicting the resilience of seagrass ecosystem to future heatwave events of varying duration, frequency, and re-occurrence

Seagrass meadows support complex species assemblages and provide ecosystem services with a multitude of socio-economic benefits. However, they are sensitive to anthropogenic pressures such as coastal development, agricultural runoff, and overfishing. The increasing prevalence of marine heatwaves associated with climate change poses an additional and growing threat. Given the ecological importance of seagrass for maintaining high biodiversity and a range of other ecosystem services and, with extreme climate events, such as marine heatwaves, predicted to become more frequent and intense. Understanding marine heatwaves impacts on the marine ecosystem is critical for assessing species adaptive capacity under future climate change scenarios. There is a demand for tools and strategies to understand trends in continued decline in seagrass, explore alternative hypotheses to mitigate marine heatwaves events, and implement risk-based responses. A general seagrass ecosystem Dynamic Bayesian Network model is developed to assess the impact of marine heatwaves on the resilience of the seagrass. To achieve this, we incorporated heat stress caused by marine heatwaves into a Dynamic Bayesian Network previously developed for seagrass and evaluated the model results of the climate change impact of various scenarios via a marine heatwave case study. Although the frequency of heat events seemed to be a significant factor in the potential damage to seagrass meadows, the impacts of heat stress were predicted to be more severe as the duration of heat events increased. Furthermore, the longer the interval between heatwaves at temperatures that do not induce heat stress, the quicker H. ovalis might recover before the next heatwave. This increased understanding on how seagrass respond to varying heat scenarios may facilitate global efforts to enhance seagrass protection, monitoring, management, and restoration. Research should be broadened to better understand the impacts of climate change on seagrass ecosystems, improve the foundation for informing climate change policy debates, and develop adaptive management responses to build resilience in marine ecosystems.

Climate change

Dynamic model

Ecological forecasting

Extreme climate events

Seagrass

Thermal stress 

Implementation and Analysis

Conference on Statistical Practice (CSP) 2023