Landscapes in the southeastern U.S. are expected to change profoundly in the next five decades. Changes in climate and land use will especially impact the rural and quasi-rural lands that still characterize much of southern Appalachia. Coweeta LTER research between 2008-14 will extend long-term measurements, field experiments and interdisciplinary modeling from small watershed studies to regional-scale analyses so as to account for increases in resource demand and competition from adjacent and more distant areas. The question that guides this research centers on how the provisioning service of water quantity, the regulating service of water quality, and the supporting service of maintaining biodiversity will be impacted by the: (1) transition in land uses from wildland to urban and peri-urban; (2) changes in climate; and (3) interactions between changes in land use and climate through on-site and off-site feedbacks.

Although the most consequential effects of climate and land use change will appear on the rural and quasi-rural lands of southern Appalachia, scientific effort to date has largely concentrated on the urban and wildland end-members of this transformational gradient. This limits understanding of the complex interactions between climate change and exurbanization that is vital to the near-term and long-term quality of life within the region. It also circumscribes the capacity to continue providing the ecosystem services of water quantity, water quality, and biodiversity within and beyond southern Appalachia. The results from this research will be of considerable interest to policy makers, planners, and regulators in southern Appalachia and the Piedmont Megapolitan Region. Their struggles into the future will center on maintaining the properties of place that make Southern Appalachia both a ‘water tower’ to the Southeast and one of the most biodiverse temperate regions in the U.S. if not the world.