Nonstationary environmental and community relationships in the North Pacific Ocean

Common approaches for summarizing multivariate environmental or community data assume that relationships among variables are stationary over time, and this assumption is often not tested. Here we test the hypothesis that relationships among environmental and community time series are nonstationary in the Gulf of Alaska ecosystem (North Pacific Ocean) over multidecadal time scales. Dynamic factor analysis (DFA) is applied to environmental and community data from before and after 1988/1989, corresponding to the timing of an abrupt decline in temporal variance of the Aleutian Low atmospheric pattern, a leading driver of Gulf of Alaska climate. Results show that covariance among local atmosphere and ocean environmental variables weakened simultaneous to the decline in Aleutian Low variance. At the same time, community-wide responses of 14 fish and crustacean populations to physical forcing weakened, as indicated by nonstationary environment-biology regression coefficients. In line with theoretical predictions, this loss of a shared response to environmental variability was accompanied by weakening community covariance. Individual populations also showed nonstationary relationships with shared trends of community variability. We conclude that assumptions of fixed environmental and community relationships are likely to produce mistaken inference in this ecosystem. Similar concerns may apply in other ecosystems subject to changing climate patterns.