LTER: Plum Island Ecosystems, the impact of changing landscapes and climate on interconnected coastal ecosystems

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The Plum Island Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research (PIE LTER) site consists of a linked watershed-marsh-estuarine system connected to the Gulf of Maine. The goal of the PIE LTER is to advance our predictive understanding of the long-term response of coupled land-marsh-estuary-ocean ecosystems to changes in three key drivers: climate, sea level and human activities. This research sheds light on how marshes are responding to sea-level rise and controls on carbon storage, or blue carbon, in marsh and estuarine ecosystems. To understand how nutrients and carbon from land influence the estuary and how marshes and estuaries contribute to oceanic carbon and nutrient budgets, the investigators are measuring the flows of carbon and nutrients across the watershed-to-ocean continuum. To understand how estuarine and marsh ecosystem food webs are changing with sea level rise and warming temperatures, the investigators are measuring changes in abundance of key species and analyzing the entire food web using tracer techniques. This information is being shared with managers from local, regional and federal agencies, as well as non-profit orgainzations. In collaboration with Mass Audubon the investigators are running a K-12 Schoolyard program, “Salt Marsh Science”, which provides ten schools with experiential learning opportunities for students and teachers. They also work with the Gulf of Maine Institute (GOMI), a non-profit that provides intensive training and on-going support to teachers to help them develop environmental community-based stewardship projects. The PIE LTER is organized around three questions that build on previous findings and integrate long-term studies with new observations, experiments, and model development. Activities within the three questions integrate across the entire watershed-marsh-estuary domain to facilitate a broader synthesis of long-term data and new observations. The first question is: “How are the sources and fates of organic matter and nutrients in the linked watershed/estuary system being altered by changing land use, sea-level rise (SLR), climate, and geomorphology?” To answer this, the investigators are examining how the linked coastal system influences estuarine production and water quality, as well as the role of coastal ecosystems in modulating carbon and nutrient fluxes to the nearshore ocean through a combination of expanded observations and numerical modeling. The second question, “How do food webs and energy flow respond to new geomorphic configurations, SLR, changing climate, and associated estuarine responses?” is being answered through a new integrative effort to determine how the landscapes’ ability to transfer energy to food webs changes with habitat. This effort is combining long-term abundance data, stable isotope data on niche size, and mapping of landscape features to model how future changes in the marsh-estuary configuration will modify energy flow. Given the importance of coastal ecosystems in supporting nearshore food webs, understanding how this link will change with climate, land use change, and SLR is critical. Finally, the investigators are asking: “What internal feedbacks might accelerate, slow down, or even reverse the predicted changes in emergent marsh configuration and the fate of carbon, nutrients and energy?” Society needs to understand more about internal feedbacks that might increase marsh resilience or compromise marsh survival as sea levels rise, systems warm, and watershed inputs continue to change. With new collaborations, the team is also leveraging large-scale marsh restoration to test hypotheses on feedback mechanisms within the system.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.