Documents - Proposals - GCE Proposals

Abstract - The Georgia Coastal Ecosystems (GCE) LTER program, which is located along three adjacent sounds on the Atlantic coast, was established in 2000. GCE research focuses on long-term change in estuarine and intertidal wetland ecosystems. In GCE-IV we will focus on disturbance. Our specific goals are to: 1) Track environmental and human drivers that can cause perturbations in our focal ecosystems. We will accomplish this through continuing long-term measurements of climate, water chemistry, oceanic exchange, and human activities on the landscape. 2) Describe temporal and spatial variability in physical, chemical, geological and biological characteristics of the domain and how they respond to external drivers. We will accomplish this through our field monitoring program in combination with remote sensing and modeling. 3) Characterize the ecological responses of intertidal marshes to disturbance. We will accomplish this by ongoing monitoring and experimental work to evaluate system response to major perturbations in three key marsh habitats (changes in inundation and top-down control in Spartinadominated salt marshes; increases in salinity in fresh marshes; changes in runoff in high marshes), by implementing standardized experimental disturbances along salinity and elevation gradients, and by tracking responses to natural disturbances. 4) Evaluate ecosystem properties at the landscape level (habitat distribution, net and gross primary production, C budgets) and assess the cumulative effects of disturbance on these properties. We will also develop relationships between drivers and response variables, which can be used to predict the effects of future changes. We will accomplish this through a combination of data synthesis, remote sensing and modeling.

Abstract - The Georgia Coastal Ecosystems (GCE) LTER is located along three adjacent sounds on the Atlantic coast and includes both intertidal marshes and estuaries. Long-term drivers of climate change, sea level rise and human alterations of the landscape will cause transitions in dominant habitat types (state changes) within the GCE domain by changing the amounts and patterns of water delivery across the landscape. These changes in water delivery can be conceptualized as presses and pulses in river inflow, local runoff, groundwater input, and tidal inundation, which will in turn manifest themselves as changes in salinity and inundation patterns in the domain. The research proposed for GCE-III is designed to address how variations in salinity and inundation, driven by climate change and anthropogenic factors, affect biotic and ecosystem responses at different spatial and temporal scales, and to predict the consequences of these changes for habitat provisioning and carbon (C) sequestration across the coastal landscape.

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