Legacy effects and memory loss: how contingencies moderate the response of rocky intertidal biofilms to present and past extreme events

Understanding how historical processes modulate the response of ecosystems to perturbations is becoming increasingly important. In contrast to the growing interest in projecting biodiversity and ecosystem functioning under future climate scenarios, how legacy effects originating from historical conditions drive change in ecosystems remains largely unexplored. Using experiments in combination with stochastic antecedent modelling, we evaluated how extreme warming, sediment deposition and grazing events modulated the ecological memory of rocky intertidal epilithic microphytobenthos (EMPB). We found memory effects in the non-clustered scenario of disturbance (60 days apart), where EMPB biomass fluctuated in time, but not under clustered disturbances (15 days apart), where EMPB biomass was consistently low. A massive grazing event impacted on EMPB biomass in a second run of the experiment, also muting ecological memory. Our results provide empirical support to the theoretical expectation that stochastic fluctuations promote ecological memory, but also show that contingencies may lead to memory loss.