Southern Appalachia on the Edge - Exurbanization & Climate Interaction in the Southeast

Coweeta水文实验室长期生态研究项目是1980年成立的六个原始LTER项目之一。坐落在北卡罗莱纳州西部的阿巴拉契亚山脉南部，该场地建立在美国林务局从20世纪30年代初开始的流域管理和水质和数量监测的悠久历史之上。从历史上看，Coweeta的研究主要集中在植被和土壤过程，这些过程解释了对各种流域操作的响应，包括森林到草地的相互转换、针叶林到硬木林的相互转换、间伐、砍伐和其他造林实践。拟议的研究将继续进行小流域研究的长期测量、实地实验和跨学科模式，同时将其扩展到区域范围，以便考虑到资源需求的增加以及来自邻近和较远地区的竞争。重点发挥水量供给生态系统服务、水质调节服务和生物多样性维持支撑服务。这种扩展是合理的，因为随着过去三十年来推动急剧城市化的社会经济因素持续存在，而重要气候因素的速率、频率和强度发生变化，预计未来50年美国东南部的景观将发生深刻变化。

The Coweeta Hydrologic Lab Long-Term Ecological Research Project was one of six original LTER projects established in 1980. Nestled in the Southern Applachian Mountains in western North Carolina, the field site is built upon a long history of U.S. Forest Service watershed manipulations and water quality and quantity monitoring dating from the early 1930s. Historically, Coweeta research focused on the vegetation and soil processes that explain the responses to the various watershed manipulations, including forest-to-grassland inter-conversions, conifer-to-hardwood forest inter-conversions, thinning, clearcutting, and other silvicultural practices. The proposed research would continue the long-term measurements, field experiments and interdisciplinary modeling from the small watershed studies, while extending them to the regional scale so as to account for increases in resource demand and competition from adjacent and more distant areas. Focus will remain on the provisioning ecosystem service of water quantity, the regulating service of water quality, and the supporting service of maintaining biodiversity. This extension is justified on the basis that landscapes in the southeastern U.S. are expected to change profoundly in the next five decades as the socioeconomic factors driving the dramatic exurbanization of the past three decades persist, while changes to the rates, frequencies and intensities of important climatic factors occur.