Date of Award

Winter 2025

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

Oceanography

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

James Pringle

Second Advisor

James E Byers

Third Advisor

Thomas Lippmann

Abstract

The dispersal of larvae plays an important role in determining the distribution of benthic meroplanktonic organisms in the coastal ocean. The work presented in this defense uses biophysical modeling approaches to examine the interaction of larval dispersal with coastal circulation and the impact of these interactions on contemporary coastal biogeography at global scales.I begin by presenting a novel method for validating numerical dispersal estimates against drifter observations from the Global Drifter Program. We find that median dispersal estimates match observations to within 5 percent, while model estimates underpredict the spread of drifters around this median by between 30 and 50 percent. These validated Lagrangian particle trajectories are then used to model surface dispersal and larval connectivity in the coastal ocean at global scales. These simple estimates of dispersal are shown to be sufficient to predict the location of a significant number of observed shelf biogeographic boundaries around the world. In the last chapter, I focus on vertical behavior, larval dispersal, and biogeographic structure on the west coast of North and Central America. The interaction of vertical behavior and cross-shelf flow is shown to play a role in setting the location of biogeographic boundaries and landscapes of relative fitness. Finally, model results are compared to observed biogeography and the distribution of species with known vertical behaviors to find where model results are consistent with observations.

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