Much of my research focuses on the highly productive California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) and how climate change and fishing pressures impact these valuable marine communities. Employing eDNA metabarcoding, I unlocked a 23-year archival time series of fishes from the CalCOFI surveys, demonstrating tropicalization of assemblages and declines in key fisheries targets in response to the 2014-16 marine heatwave—all from shed DNA in ethanol preservative. This innovative approach allows us to extend ecological baselines to understand how marine ecosystems respond to warming seas, opening the door to a suite of research questions investigating the trophic dynamics of marine ecosystems and fisheries resources - information critical to NOAA to ensure the effective management of our vital marine resources.
Fundamental to the success of this research was our development of joint models using a Bayesian framework that allowed quantification of abundance from metabarcoding approaches – advancing the field beyond presence/absence research questions. Our systematic approach to combine morphological and molecular datasets allows us to jointly estimate larval biomass and opens the door for reconstructing marine assemblages from archived samples worldwide. We document tropicalization of fish assemblages in favor of southern, mesopelagic species during elevated sea surface temperatures as well as identify novel assemblages of these southern mesopelagic fishes and Northern Anchovy (Engraulis mordax). Furthermore, molecular data distinguish important cold-water indicator species and fisheries targets which lack species-specific distinguishing characteristics, revealing ecological dynamics otherwise hidden by shared larval morphology. Combined, this approach could unleash the ability to better understand temporal shifts in entire marine communities in response to environmental fluctuations, specifically allowing us to establish requisite ecological baselines and better understand trophic ecology mechanisms that govern community dynamics. Ethanol preservative-based metabarcoding can unlock archival collections worldwide for any number of ecological analyses in the context of a changing climate allowing us to better understand, both what has happened in the past as well as predict what may happen in the future.
To this end, we recently worked towards understanding the unexpected rise of Anchovy in the California Current by correlating larval anchovy abundances and eDNA derived microbial, phytoplankton, and zooplankton assemblages in an attempt to characterize favorable anchovy water conditions. This kind of work can help us better understand the prey fields and trophic interactions that drive fish recruitment dynamics.
I hope to extend these approaches to the remaining 70 gridded sites available in the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) 25+ year sample archive to investigate patterns of fish and invertebrate community assembly in response to climate change and ocean acidification. Please reach out if you would like to collaborate on this!
Manuscripts:
Fundamental to the success of this research was our development of joint models using a Bayesian framework that allowed quantification of abundance from metabarcoding approaches – advancing the field beyond presence/absence research questions. Our systematic approach to combine morphological and molecular datasets allows us to jointly estimate larval biomass and opens the door for reconstructing marine assemblages from archived samples worldwide. We document tropicalization of fish assemblages in favor of southern, mesopelagic species during elevated sea surface temperatures as well as identify novel assemblages of these southern mesopelagic fishes and Northern Anchovy (Engraulis mordax). Furthermore, molecular data distinguish important cold-water indicator species and fisheries targets which lack species-specific distinguishing characteristics, revealing ecological dynamics otherwise hidden by shared larval morphology. Combined, this approach could unleash the ability to better understand temporal shifts in entire marine communities in response to environmental fluctuations, specifically allowing us to establish requisite ecological baselines and better understand trophic ecology mechanisms that govern community dynamics. Ethanol preservative-based metabarcoding can unlock archival collections worldwide for any number of ecological analyses in the context of a changing climate allowing us to better understand, both what has happened in the past as well as predict what may happen in the future.
To this end, we recently worked towards understanding the unexpected rise of Anchovy in the California Current by correlating larval anchovy abundances and eDNA derived microbial, phytoplankton, and zooplankton assemblages in an attempt to characterize favorable anchovy water conditions. This kind of work can help us better understand the prey fields and trophic interactions that drive fish recruitment dynamics.
I hope to extend these approaches to the remaining 70 gridded sites available in the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) 25+ year sample archive to investigate patterns of fish and invertebrate community assembly in response to climate change and ocean acidification. Please reach out if you would like to collaborate on this!
Manuscripts:
- Gold, Z., Shelton, A.O., Casendino, H.R., Duprey, J., Gallego, R., Van Cise, A., Fisher, M., Jensen, A.J., D’Agnese, E., Andruszkiewicz Allan, E. and Ramón-Laca, A., 2023. Signal and noise in metabarcoding data. Plos one, 18(5), p.e0285674.
- Gold, Z., Kelly, R.P., Shelton, A.O., Thompson, A.R., Goodwin, K.D., Gallego, R., Parsons, K.M., Thompson, L.R., Kacev, D. and Barber, P.H., 2023. Message in a bottle: Archived DNA reveals marine heatwave‐associated shifts in fish assemblages. Environmental DNA.
- Shelton, A.O., Gold, Z.J., Jensen, A.J., D′ Agnese, E., Andruszkiewicz Allan, E., Van Cise, A., Gallego, R., Ramón‐Laca, A., Garber‐Yonts, M., Parsons, K. and Kelly, R.P., 2023. Toward quantitative metabarcoding. Ecology, 104(2), p.e3906.
- Satterthwaite, E., Allen, A., Lampe, R., Gold, Z., Thompson, A., Bowlin, N., Swalethorp, R., Goodwin, K., Hazen, E., Bograd, S. and Matthews, S., 2023. Toward Identifying the Critical Ecological Habitat of Larval Fishes: An Environmental DNA Window into Fisheries Management.