EDI Staging Environment
Most ecosystems are impacted by human activities to some degree, but this can vary considerably between locations. For example, cities differ in their impacts on streams and rivers depending on age, storm water infrastructure, amount of green space, and other factors of the built environment. Natural factors such as climate (temperature and precipitation) and geology also affect how different cities influence water quality and quantity at different times of the year. In this project, differences in urban impacts on carbon inputs and outputs in streams will be evaluated across cities in the U.S. that have different urban and climate contexts. This research is critical for understanding ecological patterns and processes in urban streams.
This study takes a novel approach to jointly consider how the human and ecological dimensions of ecosystem ecology interact to control the quality, quantity, and timing of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) entering watersheds across the continent. This project assesses how urbanization affects DOC, focusing on how urbanization affects stream ecosystems in regionally-specific ways. We tested the hypothesis that human activities introduce novel sources of DOC and affect the spatial and temporal scales and variability of ecological processes in different geographies and urban contexts. The hypothesis was tested using a comparative approach to understand urban effects on DOC in five urban study areas - Miami, FL, Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, Salt Lake City, UT, and Portland, OR. Extensive synoptic sampling of DOC concentrations and quality were be combined with intensive sensor networks to develop a multi-scale understanding of the quantity and quality of DOC in urban systems.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
