LTER V: Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystems

Coastal ecosystems provide many benefits and services to society, including protection from storms, habitat and food for important fisheries, support of tourism and local economies, filtration of freshwater, and burial and storage of carbon that offsets greenhouse gas emissions. The Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research (FCE LTER) program addresses why coastal ecosystems and services are changing and how this may be explained by shifts in hydrology. Like many coastal ecosystems, the Florida Everglades has been threatened by diversion of freshwater to support urban and agricultural expansion but is undergoing widespread restoration of seasonal pulses of freshwater. Rapid sea level rise is also causing saltwater intrusion of coastal ecosystems, which stresses freshwater species, causes elevation loss, and salinizes municipal water resources. Researchers are continuing long-term studies and experiments to understand how changes in freshwater supply, sea level rise, and disturbances like tropical storms interact to influence ecosystems and their services. The interdisciplinary research team includes resource managers who use discoveries and knowledge from the program to guide effective freshwater restoration and engage an active community of academic and agency scientists. The program has a robust education and outreach program that educates and engages students, educators, and the general public regarding scientific discoveries of coastal ecosystems. The FCE LTER program integrates disturbance ecology and ecosystem development theories to understand and test how climate variability and water management drive hydrologic presses and pulses as well as how disturbance legacies can result from hydrologic changes. Further, the research will investigate how governance of freshwater and changing values of ecosystem services interact with structural and functional responses in social-ecological landscapes to influence resilience and long-term ecosystem trajectories. Hypotheses will be tested through collection of continued long-term and new data, human dimensions research, landscape-level experiments, as well as process and landscape-scale modeling. Freshwater restoration is predicted to reduce the effects of sea level rise on saltwater intrusion (a hydrologic press), and fresh and marine hydrologic pulses will likely control resource distribution and long-term trajectories of social-ecological systems and services. Syntheses will use data from national and international research networks to holistically understand how changing hydrology and disturbance legacies drive ecosystem trajectories, addressing one of the most pressing challenges in contemporary ecology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.