Marine Ecology. ISSN 0173-9565 ORIGINAL ARTICLE A comparison of intertidal species richness and composition between Central California and Oahu, Hawaii Chela J. Zabin1,2, Eric M. Danner3, Erin P. Baumgartner4, David Spafford5, Kathy Ann Miller6 & John S. Pearse7 1 Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Tiburon, CA, USA 2 Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA, USA 3 Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Santa Cruz, CA, USA 4 Department of Biology, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR, USA 5 Department of Botany, University of Hawaii, Manoa, HI, USA 6 University Herbarium, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 7 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA Keywords Abstract Climate change; range shifts; rocky shores; temporal comparisons; tropical islands; The intertidal zone of tropical islands is particularly poorly known. In contrast, tropical versus temperate. temperate locations such as California’s Monterey Bay are fairly well studied. However, even in these locations, studies have tended to focus on a few species Correspondence or locations. Here we present the results of the first broadscale surveys of Chela J. Zabin, Smithsonian Environmental invertebrate, fish and algal species richness from a tropical island, Oahu, Research Center, 3152 Paradise Drive, Hawaii, and a temperate mainland coast, Central California. Data were gath- Tiburon, CA 94920, USA. ered through surveys of 10 sites in the early 1970s and again in the mid-1990s E-mail:
[email protected] in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, California, and of nine sites in 2001– Accepted: 18 August 2012 2005 on Oahu. Surveys were conducted in a similar manner allowing for a comparison between Oahu and Central California and, for California, a com- doi: 10.1111/maec.12007 parison between time periods 24 years apart.