@phdthesis{oai:oist.repo.nii.ac.jp:02000030,
 author = {Otis Brunner},
 month = {2023-09-20, 2023-09-20},
 note = {Connectivity, or the movement of individuals among isolated habitat patches, promotes local and regional biodiversity, and its resilience to disturbances both natural and anthropogenic. Species associated with seafloor hydrothermal vent habitats are distinctly reliant on connectivity due to their spatial restriction to the point source of chemical energy from vent chimneys that fuels their chemosynthetic food web. Measuring connectivity among hydrothermal vents is particularly urgent in regions where mining of these ecosystems is imminent. Our understanding of connectivity is limited by the scarcity of observational data from these inaccessible deep-sea ecosystems. Modelling is a viable alternative to the study of connectivity, as the dispersal that facilitates connectivity is mostly dictated by predictable ocean currents, which can be reliably simulated. This thesis combines empirical observations of species’ distributions and environmental conditions at hydrothermal vents with
simulations of dispersal, to model connectivity among vent sites in the Northwest Pacific. First, I curate a regional dataset of hydrothermal vent species distributions to infer connectivity in the form of a species assemblage network (Chapter 1). I then simulate how the planktonic larvae of vent species disperse among the vent sites in this region using Lagrangian particle tracking methods within an Ocean General Circulation Model (Chapter2). Finally, I combine the among-site dispersal estimates with observations of local environmental parameters to create a simulated species assemblage network using a metacommunity model (Chapter 3). This metacommunity model accurately recreated the empirical observations from chapter 1 and gives crucial insight into the interacting effects of dispersal barriers and environmental niche on driving diversity and community composition patterns at hydrothermal vents. Furthermore, I used the combination of observed and simulated connectivity results to quantitatively evaluate the relative role each individual hydrothermal vent plays in maintaining connectivity and biodiversity in the region. Such an evaluation has critical and timely implications for proposed mining and the spatial management of hydrothermal vents in this region. Lastly, we demonstrate that hydrothermal vents are natural laboratories for the advancement of metacommunity theory and conservation ecology due to their characteristic isolation and discrete nature.},
 school = {Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University},
 title = {熱水噴出孔における多様性の構築における幼生分散の役割},
 year = {}
}