Freshwater delivery is an important factor determining salinity in the LTER Georgia Coastal Ecosystem (GCE) site. Variability in freshwater delivery was examined in relation to various climate indices: the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Bermuda High Index (BHI). Monthly standardized anomalies of river discharge and climate indices were compared with multi-decadal time series of Altamaha watershed precipitation at 7-13 stations using empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis to describe the precipitation patterns.

Quality control is a critical component of environmental data management, particularly for data collected by autonomous sensors. Performing quality analysis on high volume, real-time data from sensor networks, flux towers and instrumented platforms is a major challenge, though, and can become a limiting factor in managing these data. Software developed at the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER Site (GCE Data Toolbox for MATLAB) has proven very effective for quality control of both real-time and legacy data, as well as interactive analysis during post processing and synthesis.

The dominant paradigm for explaining vegetation pattern in salt marshes is that there is a tradeoff between competitive ability and stress tolerance, leading to vegetation zones along a single gradient of increasing flooding and salinity from high to low marsh. This single-gradient paradigm breaks down, however, when the salinity gradient is decoupled from the flooding gradient, as happens following disturbance or at low latitudes.

Both natural processes (e.g., erosion, vegetative succession) and human processes (e.g., prehistoric shell deposition, modern clearing) have impacted the structure of back-barrier islands on the coast of Georgia. Both types of processes have occurred continually throughout the past and present. Present-day-back-barrier islands cannot be understood without a thorough knowledge of their landscape history. For a full understanding of coastal ecosystems, they need to be viewed as human ecosystems that are the result of both natural and human processes.