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

考维塔水文实验室长期生态研究项目是1980年建立的六个原始LTER项目之一。该现场坐落在北卡罗来纳州西部的南阿普拉契亚山脉，建立在美国林务局自20世纪30年代初开始的流域管理和水质水量监测的悠久历史之上。从历史上看，Coweeta研究的重点是植被和土壤过程，解释了各种流域的操作，包括森林到草地的相互转换，针叶树到硬木森林的相互转换，间伐，皆伐和其他造林的做法。拟议的研究将继续进行小流域研究的长期测量、实地试验和跨学科建模，同时将其扩展到区域范围，以考虑到资源需求的增加以及来自邻近和更远地区的竞争。重点关注水量生态系统服务的提供、水质生态系统服务的调节和生物多样性生态系统服务的维持。这种扩展是合理的基础上，在美国东南部的景观预计将在未来50年发生深刻的变化，因为社会经济因素推动了过去三十年的戏剧性的外城市化持续存在，而变化的速度，频率和强度的重要气候因素发生。

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.