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September 25, 2024 @ 9:00 am-10:00 am –

The power of data synthesis for understanding the effects of coastal hurricanes

Christopher J. Patrick, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, The Virginia Institute of Marine Science, William & Mary

Hurricanes are projected to increase in frequency, intensity, and spatial coverage with climate change, however, our understanding of how and why coastal systems respond to particular hurricane events remains limited. The HERS-RCN (Hurricane Ecosystem Response Synthesis – Research Coordination Network) was created to address this need.  The presentation will include the rationale for the RCN, moving the field past “my system, my storm” case studies, summarizing the network efforts so far including what has been learned through data synthesis, and describing where the research coordination network efforts are headed next.

Highlights from network research include several data stories that come from our data synthesis.  These include the recent discovery that ecosystem responses to hurricanes tend to covary in terms of response size relative to stress (resistance) and recovery time relative to response magnitude (resilience), the effect that hurricane frequency has on functional diversity of coastal ecological communities, and the finding that fish community resilience to the hurricanes in the southeast United States has been declining.  The presentation will also touch on recent efforts to link ecological work to the social sciences, building the responses of socio-economic systems into our conceptual framework.

Christopher J. Patrick, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at The Virginia Institute of Marine Science, William & Mary, where he runs the Coastal & Estuarine Ecology Lab and is the Lead PI and Director of The HERS (Hurricane Ecosystem Response Synthesis) RCN (Research Coordination Network). He is also the Director of the Submersed Aquatic Vegetation Restoration & Monitoring Program at VIMS, and lead PI of MarineGEO Virginia. He has a B.S. in Behavior, Evolution, Ecology, and Systematics from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. Prior to VIMS, Chris was a Research Scientist at The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (2011-2014), an American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science & Technology Policy Fellow placed with EPA Office of Water/Office of Science & Technology (2014-2015), and an Assistant Professor of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi (2016-2019) where he developed and directed MarineGEO Texas. With over 45 peer-reviewed publications to his credit, recent relevant papers on the topic of hurricane impacts on coastal systems include papers in Estuaries & Coasts, Science Advances, Bioscience, and Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment.