Project ECOTONE: Energetic Connectivity Of Terrestrial and Oceanic Nearshore Ecosystems

An "ecotone" is a transitional habitat between two adjacent ecosystems or ecological communities. Our project focuses on the coastal ecotone, or the narrow strip of habitat connecting land and sea. The coastal ecotone in Southern California is highly sought after by tourists, land developers, and wealthy homeowners, all searching for that sun-kissed ocean view. However, these stakeholders are often in direct conflict with the other seekers of coastal tranquility: local wildlife! When land animals move across the coastal ecotone to forage in marine environments, they transport nutrients from the highly productive and nutrient rich ocean inland to less verdant coastal sagebrush habitat. This movement of nutrients may be essential to maintaining native plant growth near the ocean, and marine-based food is a potentially important resource for coastal wildlife.

Our Study Site: The Gaviota Coast, California

Between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispbo lies the Gaviota Coast, a small section of California coastline that is mostly protected from human development, allowing for free movement of wildlife. This research explores how this uniquely intact coastline facilitates natural behaviors of California wildlife, and whether or not typically terrestrial animals travel on and forage in the coastal ecotone when they have unencumbered access to it.

Our Questions

One component of Project ECOTONE uses wildlife cameras (a.k.a. trail cams or camera traps) placed on the landward edge of Gaviota Coast beaches to capture photographic evidence of wild animals visiting the beaches. The research questions that we hope to answer using these images include:

1. Is terrestrial wildlife regularly visiting intertidal habitats such as beaches, splash zones, rocky intertidal shelves, or boulder fields?

2. What species use intertidal habitats for foraging and at what frequency?

3. Does time of year affect the visitation of and frequency of foraging in intertidal habitats by these species?​

We are also interested in how human activity affects the wildlife that are visiting the beaches, and have centered our camera distribution around a popular recreation hotspot: Jalama Beach County Park. Public access to much of the rest of the Gaviota Coast is heavily restricted, either because it is privately owned, part of the Dangermond Preserve (run by the Nature Conservancy), or part of the Vandenberg Space Force Base. This allowed us to set cameras along a gradient of human use (high use closer to Jalama Park, lower use as we move further into restricted access) to address the question:

4. Does proximity to human activity affect the visitation of and frequency of foraging in intertidal habitats by wildlife?

We are also collecting data on the human activity we see in our wildlife camera footage to approach the same question from a different angle.

Our Methods

We place Browning and Reconyx wildlife cameras right on the landward edge of the beaches north and south of Jalama Beach County Park, with permission from both the Nature Conservancy and Vandenberg Space Force Base. Our cameras are installed about a half-meter from the ground and typically face either up or down the beach, because we quickly learned that motion-activated cameras pointed at the ocean result in a lot of misfires! Cameras take a burst of eight or ten photos when triggered by movement, and are running 24/7 for an entire year. This way, we hope to detect seasonal patterns in animal movement and foraging.

Once a month, our team visits each camera and swaps the memory cards, checks camera batteries and positioning, and checks the photos for misfires. Then, we deliver the photos with wildlife in them straight to Zooniverse to be identified by you!

We will use your identifications to help us understand species richness (number of species), evenness (how many of each species), and other metrics of ecological communities at each camera site. We will then compare the camera sites to each other, specifically looking for patterns related to human activity and site characteristics.

Our end goal is to help coastal land managers, especially organizations like the Nature Conservancy, better understand wildlife movement in spaces where there is little human influence. This understanding directly shapes conservation policy and management of wild and wild-adjacent spaces; for example, if we find that coyotes use the beaches more during the summer when food they hunt further inland is scarce, we can use that information to protect access to beaches by coyotes during the summer months (e.g. limiting foot traffic or recreation). This project is also part of a larger body of work addressing the critical movement of nutrients from highly productive coastal ecosystems (e.g. the California kelp forests) to more low-nutrient systems like coastal chaparral. With your help, we can create a better coastline for wildlife, understand their role in the movement of nutrients, and reduce the risk of human-wildlife conflict in this unique coastal ecosystem!