Other Files - Research Data

Description - Understanding the relative strengths of top-down and bottom-up forces is an important key to predicting the structure of biological communities. The strength of these effects can be regulated in part by predator abundance and nutrient availability. In 2009, we hypothesized that the importance of these factors varies geographically between the southeastern Atlantic Coast and the Gulf Coast due to differences in tidal regime, and began to study this variation using a biogeographic, manipulative field experiment. Although our original purpose was to understand the structure of salt marsh arthropod food webs, BP's Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf Coast presented an opportunity to understand how stress from an oil spill might affect the variables that we were measuring. The fact that we had plots and transect sampling in place at multiple sites along the Gulf and East Coasts put us in a position to evaluate any impacts that might occur if oil hit some of the sites.

The study was conducted at 11 sites across the Gulf Coast, from Texas to Florida, and 11 sites along the Atlantic Coast, from Florida to Maine. At each site, experimental plots were sampled and a 100m transect was sampled near the plots within 5m of the high marsh boundary. Sampling was conducted in May 2009, August 2009, and August 2010. In 2010, four extra sites were added to the existing experimental sites because of known oil contamination, and another site was added as an extra control. Only the transect sampling was conducted at these sites. At this date we are making available the metadata and study locations in order to inform other research efforts related to the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Data will be made available after samples are processed.

Description - This data set uses USGS archival Landsat 5 and 8 imagery to study long-term spatio-temporal patterns of aboveground biomass in the foundational salt marsh species Spartina alterniflora. These data are a subcompnent of a whole-Georgia coast comparison of ten estuaries (USGS-delineated HUCs) that encompass the entire Georgia coast. The present data set were used in a gap-filling and wavelet analysis by Kadir Bice, a GCE LTER supported graduate student at the University of Georgia - Athens, to determine which hydrologic, climatic, and weather variables best explain Spartina biomass temporal patterns at different time scales. As of this posting, a manuscript of this data analysis and results (K. Bice, J. Schalles, J. Sheldon, M. Alber, and C. Meile) is in review. Metadata and citations related to methodological procedures are enclosed in the accompanying Excel spreadsheet.