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Activities
Integrated Project Areas and Research Areas
Project Directory
Proposals
Progress Reports
Cross-Site Activities
Network Activities
Survey 200
IPA and ASM Notes |
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Integrated Project Areas (IPA)
Land-Use and Land-Cover Change
Land use and land cover define the context of the socio-ecosystem, and alterations in their patterns represent some of the most seminal changes in the system. We ask: How have land use and land cover changed in the past, and how are they changing today? How do land-use and land-cover changes alter the ecological and social environment in the city, and how do human perceptuions of these changes alter future decision making? This understanding, in turn, sets the stage for all other IPA research.
Climate-Ecosystem Interactions
Climate is an important driver of processes in most ecosystems. The spatial and temporal dynamics of human actions both deliberately (irrigation) and inadvertently (urban heat island) modify the urban climate. Studies of climate-ecosystem interactions will be conducted at multiplescales from single organism to regional. We ask: How does
human-driven, local climate change compare with longer-term trends and/or cycles of climate in
the region? How do regional drivers influence local climate as urbanization proceeds? What are
people’s perceptions of their local environment, including climate, and how does that affect their
assessment of neighborhood or regional quality of life? What are the interactions among local
management, local climate, net primary production (NPP) and vegetation processes?
Water Policy, Use, and Supply
Humans now appropriate 100% of the surface flow of the
Salt River and are increasingly exploiting groundwater resources and surface waters from more
distant basins (e.g., Colorado River). Controlled management and engineering shift the characteristic
spatial and temporal variability of the hydrologic system. What are the ecological and economic
consequences and potential vulnerabilities of those shifts? What institutional responses
best address those vulnerabilities? Within this IPA, we examine landscape water management,
water supply and delivery, riparian restoration, and resilience of the socio-ecosystem to waterrelated
stress or catastrophe.
Fluxes of Materials and Socio-Ecosystem Response
Material fluxes and biogeochemical
linkages have been studied for decades in relatively ndisturbed ecosystems, but not in urban
ecosystems where human-generated fluxes of nutrients and toxins are coupled with nonhuman
biogeochemistry. The main question driving the ecological research in this IPA is: How do urban
element cycles differ qualitatively and quantitatively from those of nonhuman-dominated ecosystems?
Nutrient, pollutant, and toxin element cycles drive our main sociological questions:
What are the socio-spatial distributions of anthropogenic toxins and other pollutants in the CAP
ecosystem, and what hazards to organisms (plants, animals, humans) result from these distributions?
Do citizens and decisionmakers accurately perceive these hazards?
Human Control of Biodiversity
Ecological approaches to studying human control of biodiversity
have typically focused upon habitat loss and disturbance brought about by humans at high
population densities. We will move beyond these approaches to ask: How do human activities,
behaviors, and values change biodiversity and its components—population abundance, species
distribution and richness, and community and trophic structure? In turn, how do variations in biodiversity
feed back to influence these same human values, perceptions, and actions?
Research Areas
Biogeochemical
Processes
Biogeochemical research is done on at least two scales: whole ecosystem
and patch. For the former, we are developing mass balances for nitrogen
and salts in the CAP LTER watershed. A field sampling program involves
regular measurements of nutrients, major ions, salts, and metals being
imported to and exported from the study area in surface water (rivers and
canals) and groundwater. These data are used as input to the mass balances,
to evaluate differences between input and output as a measure of the city's
effect on water quality, and to test hypotheses about temporal variability
in exports. At the patch scale, process measurements focus on atmospheric
deposition, soil nutrient transformation and storage, and the function
of recipient systems (retention basins, artifical urban lakes, streams,
and the large river channel). An ultimate goal is to understand which components
of the CAP landscape are important in nutrient retention, transformation,
and transport.
Cross-Site Integration
The CAP LTER project is at the forefront of efforts of social and natural
scientists to forge a new kind of research agenda for LTER sites. Cross-site
activities that we participate in include: 1) engaging in a range of comparative
projects with our fellow urban LTER site, the Baltimore Ecosystem Study
(BES); 2) holding workshops in social-natural science integration; 3)
organizing cross-site proposals; and 4) co-directing with BES a Biocomplexity
Incubation award from NSF that will foster planning workshops and, ultimately
three to five cross-site projects that will serve as models for integrating social
science into LTER projects.
Geophysical Context
This research area focuses on 1) developing a patch typology scheme, using
remotely sensed data analyzed with an expert land-cover classification
system; 2) describing the Quarternary geomorphology of the Phoenix Basin;
and 3) understanding the fluvial dynamics of arid-land rivers and artificial
lakes, especially how and why they are altered by urban development.
Modeling
The aim of our modeling effort is to develop a spatially explicit simulation
model for the Phoenix metropolitan landscape that can be used to understand
how land use, cover change, and ecological processes interact during urbanization.
Research topics include: 1) landscape pattern analysis; 2) land-use and
land-cover change modeling; 3) ecosystem modeling; and 4) development
of the hierarchical modeling platform.
Survey 200: Interdisciplinary Long-term
Monitoring
The 200-point survey is one of two
monitoring approaches adopted by CAP LTER. The goal is to quantify basic
ecological characteristics of the study area and monitor long-term ecological
trends over time and space. Extensive sampling of 200 randomly selected
sites, completed in spring 2000 and repeated every 3-5 years, will allow
researchers to obtain a "snapshot" of the CAP LTER ecosystem and evaluate
change in slowly cycling ecological variables.
Populations
This long-term project monitors the spatiotemporal charcteristics of organisms
in five groups: vascular plants, mycorrhizal fungi, arthropods, birds,
and insect pollinators and seeks to assess how various facets of urbanization
affect their diversity, distribution, and biotic interactions among them.
Primary Production
This set of projects concentrates on the rates of net primary production
exhibited by vegetation associated with different land-use patches and
how rates at larger scales depend on patch size, shape, location, and
configuration. Measurements of net CO2 exchange, biomass/biovolumes
of selected plants, and soil respiration at residential, desert remnant,
and agricultural sites are used to assess net aboveground primary production.
Long-term experiments focusing on urban landscaping practices on water
use have practical applications for urban ecosystem management.
Human Dimensions of Ecological
Research
The overarching question posed by this research area is: What "natural"
ecological and socioeconomic processes interact to generate spatial patterns
(e.g., land-use patch mosaic) and how do ecological consequences of development
feed back upon future decisions? Research topics focus upon 1) geographically
defined processes (urban-fringe, land-use, microclimate studies); 2) topically
defined processes (environmental policy and risks); 3) historically defined
processes (historic land use, legacy and pioneer effects); and 4) information
system of human activities (local partner databases, census data).
Information Management
Ecological informatics are the focus of an advanced lab for data management,
high-end computing, and software development that serves CAP LTER, the
broader research community, and the public. The lab supports LTER researchers
be designing databases, creating software programs for entering and querying
data, and compiling structured information about data ("metadata") to
help users understand the data. The lab provides a permanent archival
home for CAP LTER data, complete with online search and download capabilities.
K-12 Education
Environmental education and outreach activities are woven throughout the
CAP LTER, as we engage an active cadre of community partners in our research
and education efforts. In addition, we encourage ASU faculty members to
draw upon CAP LTER resources and incorporate urban ecological issues and
data into their classrooms. We reach out to the K-12 community through
Ecology Explorers, a program
that aims to:
- develop and implement a schoolyard ecology program where students
collect data similar to CAP LTER data, enter results into our database,
share data with other schools, and develop hypotheses and experiments
to explain their findings;
- improve science literacy by exposing students and teachers to real
research conducted by university-level scientists;
- enhance teachers' capabilities to design lessons and activities that
use scientific inquiry and encourage interest in science;
- provide access to and promote the use of CAP LTER-generated materials
and information; and encourage collaboration between CAP LTER researchers
and the K-12 community.
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