Human alterations of the earth's surface are widely recognized as one of the planet's most significant cumulative global environmental changes. Increasing population and per capita income suggest that this trend will continue in coming decades. In countries such as the US this process manifests principally as suburbanization.

The MIRADA project was launched in the fall of 2007 to establish a Microbial Biodiversity Survey and Inventory across all 13 of the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in the NSF US LTER Program. The long-term objective of our study is to document and describe baseline diversity and relative abundance data for both common and rare members of microbial communities and to relate this diversity to the underlying physical and chemical environment.

 Striped bass (Morone saxatilis) are a top predator that make annual migrations along the Atlantic coast to forage. Striped bass have rebounded from low numbers in the early 1980s and are now seasonally abundant in many New England estuaries. For these reasons, PIE LTER may provide critical foraging habitat for striped bass. In addition, striped bass could potentially alter trophic structures in estuarine environments.

Coastal ecosystems play a key role in the transformation, transport, burial and exchange of water and organic and inorganic carbon and nitrogen between land, atmosphere and the ocean. With an overwhelming majority of the human population living in the coastal zone, coastal ecosystems are among the most heavily impacted ecosystems in the world. Like many other coastal regions, the Plum Island Ecosystem region, which lies just north of Boston, Massachusetts, is experiencing population growth in the watershed, land use change, climate change, altered hydrologic cycles, and sea level rise.

     Coastal watersheds provide valuable ecosystem goods and services to society. Both anthropogenic and natural changes may alter the ability of natural systems to provide these goods and services. To maintain resilient ecosystems in the face of future change, we need to understand their structure and how they function. One indicator of ecosystem function is species diversity. Substantial evidence exists to suggest that more diverse systems can be more resilient to ecosystem alterations.

Reach scale experiments have shown that transient storage (TS) zones may be important controls on dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) export to coastal waters. Here, we investigated the relative impact that main channel (MC), surface TS (STS) and hyporheic TS (HTS) have on DIN removal at the network scale using a DIN removal model applied to the Ipswich River in Massachusetts, USA.

With recent shifts in public attitudes across the United States concerning the problem of global climate change, momentum is building for aggressive action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the ongoing economic recession presents challenges for financing an aggressive climate change abatement campaign; hence, it is imperative that cost-effective strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions be identified and pursued. To accomplish this, policy instruments will need to be tailored to a complex range of local and regional conditions.

 Dr Colin Polsky, Dr. Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr, Albert Decatur, Dan Runfola, Nick Giner, Rahul Rakshit, Matt Salem, Nick Perdue, Tom Hamill

Title
Looking for Lawns: How We Know What’s In Your Yard

We examine transitions of land categories from three points in time for the Plum Island Ecosystems site to test whether the transitions during the former time interval are consistent or different than the transitions during the latter time interval. Computer code has been created to automate this analysis for any other sites who would like to participate in this cross site comparison.

This study looked at the impact of high nutrient loads from non-point source pollution on the stoichiometry of detrital food webs in suburban streams: basal food resources, primary consumers, predators, and nutrient imbalances between food and consumer.