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Quantitative Evaluation of the Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on the Rocky Intertidal Community

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Ecological Impacts of Tsunamis on Coastal Ecosystems

Part of the book series: Ecological Research Monographs ((ECOLOGICAL))

Abstract

It has been widely assumed that tsunamis associated with mega-earthquakes severely damage coastal ecosystems. In no previous studies, however, have the community-level impacts of tsunamis been credibly quantified. We evaluated the impacts of the tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake (the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami) on species abundances in a rocky intertidal metacommunity encompassing 30 km of shoreline located 150–160 km north-northwest of the epicenter of the earthquake. For this purpose, we generated an indicator of the tsunami impact—the change in mean abundances between before and after the tsunami, standardized to population variability before the earthquake—for each of five sessile and six mobile species. We then used the averaged values of this indicator as a quantitative measure of tsunami impacts for the entire community and for the sessile and mobile subgroups. The tsunami had an overall significant negative impact on the rocky intertidal community at the regional scale, although the negative impact seemed smaller than those of similar large-scale disturbances on rocky intertidal communities. There was a significant negative impact of the tsunami on mobile species, but not on sessiles. The results suggest that mobiles on rocky shores are more vulnerable than sessiles to tsunamis. At a regional scale, the rocky intertidal community suffered minor damage from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to T. Hagino, Dr. T. Okuda, Dr. M. Tsujino, M. Iida, R. Sahara, M. Sakaguchi, M. Ohira, and Y. Kanamori for field assistance. We also thank Dr. Y. Nishimura for helpful comments regarding tsunamis. For field and laboratory facilities, we are grateful to the staff and students of the International Coastal Research Center of the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo. This study was made possible by the generous support and encouragement of local fishers and the fishery office of the Fisherman’s Cooperative Associations in Iwate. This research was supported by the Cooperative Program of the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo (Nos. 108, 104, 107, 101, and 103 in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, respectively, to TN), and was supported partly by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grants (Nos. 20570012, 24570012, and 15 K07208 to TN) and the Tohoku Ecosystem-Associated Marine Sciences (TEAMS) project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan

    Aiko Iwasaki & Takashi Noda

  2. The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan

    Keiichi Fukaya

Authors
  1. Aiko Iwasaki
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  2. Keiichi Fukaya
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  3. Takashi Noda
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aiko Iwasaki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Jotaro Urabe

  2. Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Tohru Nakashizuka

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Iwasaki, A., Fukaya, K., Noda, T. (2016). Quantitative Evaluation of the Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on the Rocky Intertidal Community. In: Urabe, J., Nakashizuka, T. (eds) Ecological Impacts of Tsunamis on Coastal Ecosystems. Ecological Research Monographs. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56448-5_4

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