RIG: Assessment of Secondary Succession in North Carolina: Advancing understanding of successional vegetation through coupled field and remote sensing studies

次级演替生态系统广泛分布于美国东南部，作为一个整体，包括大气二氧化碳的大量汇。尽管演替生态系统在碳循环和其他生态过程中发挥着重要作用，但这些生态系统的时空动态仍存在相当大的不确定性。 考虑到这一点，该项目的主要目标是了解美国东南部的演替生态系统的状态和控制，通过开发和分析耦合遥感和地面数据。该项目将使用新的和现有的数据集，以评估内和五个独立的景观在北卡罗来纳州之间的演替特征和生态过程。 该研究为今后进一步研究该地区及其他次生生态系统演替为重要生态系统尺度过程的地区的碳循环、水文过程和气候-植被反馈奠定了基础。 这项工作还旨在扩大参与代表性不足的学生在生态科学与美国的生态教育，发展和可持续发展战略（种子）计划的生态学会合作，招募本科生从少数民族服务和其他机构参加培训，实地考察，并与次级生态系统演替的数值分析。

Secondary successional ecosystems are widespread across the southeastern US and, as a whole, comprise a substantial sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite the important role of successional ecosystems in carbon cycling and other ecological processes, considerable uncertainty remains concerning the spatial and temporal dynamics of these ecosystems. With this in mind, the principle goal of this project is to understand the status of and controls on successional ecosystems in the southeastern US through development and analysis of coupled remotely sensed and ground based data. The project will use new and existing datasets to evaluate successional characteristics and ecological processes within and among five separate landscapes in North Carolina. This work will lay the framework for future research on carbon cycling, hydrological process, and climate-vegetation feedbacks within this region and other regions where secondary ecosystem succession is an important landscape-scale process. This work also seeks to broaden participation of underrepresented students in ecological sciences by collaborating with the Ecological Society of America's Strategies for Ecology Education, Development and Sustainability (SEEDS) program to recruit undergraduate students from minority-serving and other institutions to participate in training, fieldwork, and numerical analysis related to secondary ecosystem succession.