LAUSR

Funding information MPA Grants via California Sea Grant through the California Marine Protected Areas Baseline Program; Southern California Coastal Water Research Project; National Science Foundation-Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research, Grant/Award Number: OCE-9982105, OCE-0620276 and OCE-1232779; PISCO (Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans) funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation; University of Southern California (USC) Sea Grant, Grant/Award Number: 10-069; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Restoration Center and the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program; United States Navy Commander, US Pacific Fleet; California Ocean Science Trust; California Department of Fish & Wildlife; California Ocean Protection Council; The Bay Foundation; Resources Legacy Fund Foundation; Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment; Lisa and Douglas Goldman Foundation; State Coastal Conservancy; Annenberg Foundation; UCSB Associated Students Coastal Fund Abstract Integrating results from monitoring efforts conducted across diverse marine ecosystems provides opportunities to reveal novel biogeographic patterns at larger spatial scales and among multiple taxonomic groups. We investigated largescale patterns of community similarity across major taxonomic groups (invertebrates, fishes or algae) from a range of marine ecosystems (rocky intertidal, sandy intertidal, kelp forest, shallow and deep softbottom subtidal) in southern California. Because monitoring sites and methods varied among programs, site data were averaged over larger geographic regions to facilitate comparisons. For the majority of individual community types, locations that were geographically near or environmentally similar to one another tended to have more similar communities. However, our analysis found that this pattern of within community type similarity did not result in all pairs of these community types exhibiting high levels of crosscommunity congruence. Rocky intertidal algae communities had high levels of congruence with the spatial patterns observed for almost all of the other (fish or invertebrate) community types. This was not surprising given algal distributions are known to be highly influenced by bottomup factors and they are important as food and habitat for marine fishes and invertebrates. However, relatively few pairwise comparisons of the spatial patterns between a fish community and an invertebrate community yielded significant correlations. These community types are generally comprised of assemblages of higher trophic level species, and additional ecological and anthropogenic factors may have altered their spatial patterns of community similarity. In most cases pairs of invertebrate community types and pairs of fish community types exhibited similar spatial patterns, although there were some notable exceptions. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of results of longterm monitoring programs.