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Increased Frequency of Sediment Heatwaves in a Virginia Seagrass Meadow

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Abstract

Coastal marine heatwaves have destructive and lasting impacts on foundational species and are increasing in frequency, duration, and magnitude. High atmospheric temperatures are often associated with marine heatwaves (MHW) which are defined as 5 days of water temperatures above a seasonally varying 90th percentile threshold. In this study, we consider the prevalence of MHW propagation into surficial sediments to cause sediment heatwaves (SHW). Within a shallow, subtidal seagrass meadow in Virginia, USA, sediment temperature was measured at hourly intervals at a depth of 5 cm between June 2020 and October 2022 at the meadow edge and central meadow interior. The observed sediment temperature along with a 29-year record of water temperature and water level was used to develop a sediment temperature model for each location. Modeled sediment temperatures were used to identify sediment heatwaves that may thermally stress belowground seagrass. At both meadow locations, sediment heatwave frequency increased at a rate twice that of MHWs in the average global open ocean, coinciding with a 172% increase in the annual number of SHW days, from 11 to 30 days year−1 between 1994 and 2022. Sediment heatwaves at both meadow locations co-occurred with a MHW 79–81% of the time, with nearly all SHWs having a zero day lag. The top 10% most extreme MHWs and SHWs occurred between November and April when thermal stress to seagrass was unlikely. In June 2015, a SHW co-occurred with an anomalously long duration MHW that was associated with a 90% decline in seagrass from this system, suggesting that SHWs may have contributed to the observed seagrass loss. These results document heatwave propagation across the pelagic-sediment interface which likely occur broadly in shallow systems with impacts to critical coastal ecosystem processes and species dynamics.

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Data Availability

The high frequency water and sediment temperature time series from South Bay, VA (Tassone and Pace 2023) are publicly available on the Environmental Data Initiative data repository. Wachapreague water temperature and water level are publicly accessible via the NOAA Tides & Currents webpage (tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=8631044). Code used to run all analyses and produce all figures (except for the map in Fig. 1) are archived on GitHub and available at https://github.com/spencertassone/SedimentHeatwaves.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Patricia L. Wiberg, Karen J. McGlathery, and Julianne Quinn for helpful discussions and early revisions to this manuscript, and Jonathan A. Walter for assistance with the wavelet analysis. We thank the staff of the LTER-Virginia Coast Reserve (Cora Baird, Amelie Berger, Tom Burkett, Buck Doughty, Donna Fauber, Sophia Hoffman, David Lee, and Jonah Morreale) for field assistance.

Funding

This work was supported by funding from an NSF grant supporting the LTER-Virginia Coast Reserve (DEB 1832221) and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.

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  1. Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Spencer J. Tassone & Michael L. Pace

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, Michigan Technological University, 740 Dow Building, Houghton, MI, 49931, USA

    Spencer J. Tassone

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Tassone, S.J., Pace, M.L. Increased Frequency of Sediment Heatwaves in a Virginia Seagrass Meadow. Estuaries and Coasts 47, 656–669 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-023-01314-7

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