A Geneology of Ecosystems Scientists - Listing the geneology of some ecologists.

Following relaxations prevailing equatorward winds, warm water from the Santa Barbara Channel flows poleward around Point Conception and along the central California coast. Sequences of satellite sea surface temperature images show the events as bands of warm water extending up to 20 km offshore. Characteristics of these flows were examined using time series of currents and temperature from an array of moorings along the inner shelf (15 m depth), a mooring on the mid-shelf (100 m depth), and surface current observations from high frequency radars.

The Niwot Ridge (NWT) LTER site was one of the five original LTER sites established in 1980. The LTER program is based at the University of Colorado-Boulder and is administered through the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and in cooperation with the Mountain Research Station, with special use permits from the US Forest Service.

Ecosystems in topographically complex (mountainous) terrain are responsible for a majority of land-atmosphere CO2 exchange (net ecosystem exchange; NEE) across the western United States due to high inputs of winter precipitation as snowfall. NEE in these regions has been historically difficult to quantify using the eddy covariance (EC) method, however, due to complexities in surface terrain that lead to irregularities in streamline air flow, particularly advective fluxes during periods of low turbulent mixing.

Fragmentation of natural habitats, driven by urban growth and other land use modifications, acts to decrease the amount of core habitat as well as the connectivity among core areas. As a result, landscape fragmentation can have negative impacts on the ecological communities, ecosystem services, and metapopulation dynamics.

The exchange of water between coral reef lagoons and the open ocean depends on the interplay between waves, buoyancy, wind stress, and alongshore currents. Some processes act to retain lagoon water such as onshore flows driven by surface waves, while others (e.g., the momentum jet that exits the lagoon) export lagoon water. To explore the impact of surface waves on the exchange dynamics, observations were made in Paopao Bay, French Polynesia, a nearly tideless coral reef lagoon system.

Environmental justice research seeks to understand the patterns and processes shaping the distribution of environmental burdens and amenities across society. While environmental justice research in the US has generally focused on toxics, urban design, hazard management, and segregation have reshaped patterns of risk associated with environmental processes, such as flooding, and the social patterns of exposure to those risks. In Baltimore, flood risks have been a major impetus behind the engineering of the hydrologic systems of the city.

The Chicago Region ULTRA-Ex will address a question fundamental to understanding the dynamic interactions between biodiversity conservation, ecosystem processes, and human well being in urban landscapes: In a complex urban/metropolitan system, what are the synergies and tradeoffs between conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services to people? The project focuses on the Green Infrastructure Vision of the Chicago Wilderness alliance, a conservation consortium of over 240 organizations.

Bonanza Creek LTER focuses on the Alaskan boreal forest. The forest provides important ecosystem services that include tangible benefits for the communities that reside in Interior Alaska.  Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as berries, mushrooms, firewood, and birch bark are key resources that are gathered from the landscape. NTFPs are harvested for subsistence, cultural, personal, and commercial purposes.

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.