Laura Bachmaier1,2, Pete Cotton1, Antony Knights3, Louise Firth3, David Bilton1, Kerry Howell4
1University of Plymouth, UK - 2Met Office, UK - 3University College Cork, Ireland - 4Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
Connectivity is a cornerstone of community assembly, underpinning the maintenance of biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides. It refers to the exchange of individuals between spatially separated communities, linking local populations to the global species pool. In marine systems, connectivity commonly refers to the dispersal of offspring away from natal communities. It is shaped by ocean parameters like current velocity and species’ planktonic life history traits, habitat preferences and dispersal strategies. However, understanding how individual species dispersal influences broader community connectivity and community assembly has been a persistent challenge due to the diversity of traits and strategies involved.
To address this, we developed the Community Connectivity Package (CCM), a Python-based tool that provides a user-friendly option to estimate the potential connections of a species and assess its impact on overall community connectivity. While the package itself represents an important advancement in connectivity modelling, this presentation primarily focuses on the application of CCM to the conservation of benthic intertidal rocky shore communities of the English Channel. Using CCM, we identify critical sites across the southern UK seascape that maintain biodiversity and quantify individual and community level local retention, larval mortality and show how connectivity influences similarity in species composition.
This applied example advances our theoretical understanding of community connectivity and provides insights into the role of connectivity in maintaining biodiversity in temperate intertidal systems, with implications for marine spatial planning and conservation. By bridging computational tools and applied conservation, this work emphasises the importance of multi-species approaches in safeguarding marine biodiversity.
Biography
Laura is a Doctoral Teaching Assistant and PhD student in marine sciences at the University of Plymouth. Her research focuses on the role of connectivity in shaping temperate benthic rocky shore communities. Her broader research interests include ecosystem-based management and rewilding. During her BSc and MSc, Laura studied the behaviour, diet, and distribution of neotropical river otters in Ecuador and assessed seagrass meadows’ carbon storage potential as a nature-based climate solution.