Aerial, hyperspectral AISA imagery (http://calmit.unl.edu/champ/) at 1 m resolution was acquired at low tide on the morning of June 20, 2006 for the Duplin River watershed located within the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Reserve. The Duplin site is a Georgia Coastal Ecosystems focus for integrative studies. Ground truth habitat data, collected within two weeks of the imagery, included: salt marsh communities (plant species cover, canopy height, biomass, soil properties, invertebrate densities) and open water (chlorophyll a, total suspended matter, CDOM).

 Phytoplankton production in the Santa Barbara Channel supports one of the richest marine ecosystems in the Southern California Bight. The climatology of chlorophyll biomass in the area reveals maxima over the Santa Barbara Basin in the western Channel and along the mainland in the eastern channel where the continental shelf broadens and where two rivers discharge seasonally.

Land use change is one of the most important factors contributing to CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere, but also to the loss of biodiversity and alteration of hydrologic cycle in different biomes. In Central-Northern Mexico, the shortgrass steppe is highly threatened by different types of land use change including, overgrazing, agricultural development, and shrub encroachment. Recent assessments along the shortgrass steppe reported between 15 to 110 MT C ha^-1 y^-1, which summing the large extent of semiarid grasslands (~ 100,000 Km²).

Ecosystems with little or no plant cover are often described as barren, however these systems can host diverse microbial communities. Yet, the biological functioning of these soils in high-altitude mountain ecosystems is poorly understood. We measured soil CO₂ fluxes and used molecular techniques to determine the composition of the bacterial and eukaryotic community at “barren” high-elevation sites in Colorado.

Freshwater wetlands of the Florida Everglades are oligotrophic (water total phosphorus < 10 ug/L in unenriched marsh), with published values for average aboveground net primary productivity of sawgrass ranging from 255-606 g C m^-2 yr-¹ and periphyton from 17-10,371 g C m^-2 yr^-1. High temporal and spatial variability in these estimates, derived primarily by harvesting and small-scale gas exchange techniques, have been attributed to the underlying geology and hydrology of the landscape and phenology of dominant species.

Morgan, JA, DP Smith and WJ Parton*; Shortgrass Steppe LTER; USDA-ARS and *Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO

Ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi are a prominent and ubiquitous feature of forest soils, forming symbioses with most tree species, yet little is known about the magnitude of their impact on forest carbon cycles. A subset of EM fungi form dense, perennial aggregations of hyphae, which have elevated respiration rates compared with neighboring non-mat soils. These mats are a foci of EM activity and thereby a natural laboratory for examining how EM fungi impact forest soils.

The 2007 Regional report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the central grassland region of North America is very likely to warm substantially during the twenty first century. Modelers are less certain about changes in the timing and amount of precipitation in the region. Our research examines how changes in plant available water will affect critical biological processes in the central grassland region of North America, specifically comparing a site at the Shortgrass Steppe LTER to a site on the mixed grass prairie near Hays, KS.

Quantifying variability in nutrient transport is important for understanding the maintenance of coastal ecosystems. Understanding of the processes that control variability in nutrient transport off of Southern California is complicated by the very narrow continental shelf (2-5 km) in this region, which creates a more direct connection between shallow reefs and deeper oceanic waters. The Santa Barbara Channel (SBC) is one of these environments.

An aspect of climate change in California has been an increase in the intensity and frequency of winter storms. Disturbance from storms is a major source of variation in the standing biomass of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, a competitive dominant on shallow reefs that forms a dense overstory canopy at the sea surface. Climate induced changes in the standing biomass of Macrocystis are expected to have a profound effect on the assemblage of subordinate understory macroalgae.