Human settlements in both arid lands and cities must, of necessity, alter hydrological regimes and geomorphology to provide clean, reliable drinking water, water for agriculture, and protection from flooding. Additionally, people also create substantial modifications to provide water for manufacturing, recreation, aesthetics, and sense of place. All of these practices can result in elimination or degradation of existing aquatic ecosystems, as well as creation of new ecosystems such as artificial lakes, stormwater retention basins, mitigation wetlands, groundwater recharge ponds, etc.

Human management of landscapes is a primary cause of global environmental change. In residential landscapes, homeowner yard management can affect ecological properties and processes locally and regionally. For example, turfgrass lawns are now one of the largest irrigated crops in the U.S., contributing to high water and fertilizer use. Social drivers, such as personal values or Homeowner Association (HOA) regulations, also impact individual yard management decisions.

Research at the FCE-LTER builds on a substantial body of knowledge about oligotrophic estuaries. In particular, we study how changes in hydrology caused by human activities interact with natural disturbances and sea-level rise to affect dynamics in the estuarine ecotone of the Everglades. The greater Everglades ecosystem is the site of the world’s largest ecosystem restoration efforts, with aims to restore freshwater flow into this highly engineered landscape.

Soil microbes are key drivers of ecosystem processes, yet their role in regulating landscape-scale vegetation change is not known. Comprehensive studies of treeline position have noted that ectomycorrhizal fungi may be an important factor delineating the boundary between forest and tundra. Yet, these critical plant-fungal symbioses are sensitive to wildfires. Fire is the primary landscape-scale disturbance in the boreal forest and increasingly important in tundra.

A major goal of the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER research program is to investigate how changes in freshwater flow related to Everglades ecosystem restoration will impact ecosystem processes, specifically in the Shark River Slough/Gulf of Mexico and the Taylor Slough/Florida Bay ecotones of Everglades National Park. This research is as much a question about natural processes as it is social processes.

This would be an updated stable isotope working group that we ran in 2006. It was done at the last LTER to a room that overflowed, and some were not able to come in the room.

Stable isotope analyses remain proven technologies for characterizing long term change within ecosystems. This workshop/ information exchange/brainstorming group will focus on new technologies of continuous monitoring, or continuous flow analyses, as well as new elements that could be or are being employed for assessment of processes and sources within LTER ecosystems.

Invertebrates have known impacts on ecosystem services, and these impacts are likely to change as invertebrates respond to climate change. In this workshop, we aim to use the breadth of knowledge and diversity of sites in the LTER network to conceptualize the impacts that invertebrates have on ecosystem services, and how these may be altered by climate change. Invertebrates impact ecosystem services both directly (e.g. pollination, pest and disease control, water pollution, decomposition, and recreation) and indirectly through their consumption of primary producers (e.g.

 In temperate systems, invertebrate consumers have known impacts to ecosystem processes, but in tropical ecology, it is assumed that only plant and microbes affect these processes. This study investigated what impacts common folivores (walking sticks) and detritivores (litter snails) have on decomposition, nutrient cycling and primary productivity in the understory of the Luquillo rainforest (LUQ). To test these effects, we started an enclosure experiment with consumers both present and absent in 2005.

Land uses and management practices in residential parcels (e.g., aesthetic/recreational/economic uses, land-cover choices, irrigation and chemical applications) impact and are impacted by social (e.g., stratification and status, environmental perceptions, zoning) and ecological (e.g., carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, water demand and quality) processes.