LTER: Pelagic Community Structure Interannual Variability and Long-Term Change in Pelagic Community Structure Across a Latitudinal Gradient

Recent synthesis has shown both similarities and differences in how pelagic marine ecosystems have been influenced by cyclic and long‐term changes in the marine environment. We propose to dive deeper into such comparisons, by using comparative data to test a series of conceptual models describing how communities respond to stochastic and long‐term change along the latitudinal gradient represented by the four participating LTER sites. We propose a multipronged team approach along two major lines of inquiry: 1) examining whether patterns & processes discovered in the California Current Ecosystem (CCE) apply to other pelagic sites, and 2) exploring whether recently proposed global pelagic community responses apply to the LTER sites, including how such responses are modulated by season and how they may have changed over decadal time‐frames.