Angelo Coast Range Reserve Research Plan

Summary
The overall goal of NCED’s research at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve (ACRR) field site is to develop and test linked physical, biogeochemical, and ecological models to predict landscape and ecosystem dynamics for:
1)    exploring coupled landscape and ecosystem evolution;
2)    assessing the system’s response to climatic or land-use perturbations; and
3)    guiding land-use and restoration geomorphology.

By focusing on the “future” our science plan will address both the theoretical motivation of NCED’s research (quantification and mechanistic explanation of earth-surface processes) and the practical application of this research (predictive tools for land use management and planning).

Angelo Data Archive

Science Goals
Detailed work within and near the ACRR will serve as a basis for later comparisons with data gathered by NCED scientists and other colleagues from other parts of the Eel River Basin.   The goal is to develop and parameterize models which capture key linkages of ecologic, hydrologic, biogeochemical, and geomorphic processes.

Ultimately, for various scenarios of climate, biotic, and land use change, we hope to:
1)    Develop models that predict ecological and landscape changes in subcatchments;
2)    Estimate import-export budgets of organisms, heat, water, sediments, or solutes between subcatchments; and
3)    Combine (1) and (2) to devise models capable of predicting over the whole 9000 km 2 basin, and calibrate these models with hindcasts from the STRATFORM record offshore.

Major research questions
The interaction between landscape changes and ecosystem processes is characterized by nonlinear and nonqeuilibrium dynamics and occurs across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Spatial scales ranging from bacterial (0 - ~10 -6m) to landscape (10 5m), while associated time scales, spans the range from bacterial metabolism (seconds) to changing climatic (decades). While designing an environmental field facility and corresponding monitoring network research the above processes across the entire range of scales is not possible, the quantification of cause-effect relations of fluctuations (deviations from local equilibrium conditions) across characteristic scale categories (micro, fine and large subscales) is a feasible task. Once these interactions across subscales are quantified, integration across the spatial and temporal scales will be conducted by numerical simulation models.

Under this conceptual framework, four research modules were identified (see Figure below) to concurrently address the static (local equilibrium) and dynamic (non-equilibrium) physical, biological and chemical processes at the site. These modules cut across NCED’s Focus Areas and Integrated Projects and are designed to promote collaborative research among the Principal Investigators with diverse experience.

Modules:
Module 1: Channel 3D Network Structure and River Basin Vegetation
Module 2: Habitat Structure and Environmental Regime
Module 3: Sediment Dynamics and Routing
Module 4: Seasonal Population Dynamics and Food Web Structure

Interactions:
Module 1 to 2: Interactions between Network Structure and Habitat Structure
Module 4 to 2: Interactions between food web dynamics and habitat structure
Module 1 to 4: Influence of network structure on food web dynamics
Module 3 to 4: Interactions between sediment and food web dynamics
Module 2 to 3: Interactions between habitat structure and sediment dynamics

Additional overriding research questions

Identify interactions across spatial scales and environments.
Our work falls into three scale ranges: grain (micron to cm), channel (dm-10’s m) and basin (100’s m – 100’s km). An important issue in modeling is to define exchanges across scales, since all practical modeling of complex systems involves some choice about the range of resolved scales. Our template for this will be Large Eddy Simulation analysis of turbulence, and we will develop techniques for synthesizing and parameterizing ‘subgrid’ fluxes for each scale range and for fluxes across environmental boundaries. For example, this could include microbial effects on nutrient flux from channel to floodplain.

The ‘large element’ approach shows how small-scale dynamics can influence dynamics at larger scales. However, there is evidence that small-scale dynamics can be controlled by large-scale structure, in particular location relative to the overall basin structure.   We propose further work along these lines via three ‘integrative activities’: co-organization of channel networks and riparian vegetation (channel-basin scale), seasonal probabilistic soil-water balance (channel-basin scale) and coupling fluid flow, vegetation and soil biogeochemical processes over a river network (grain-basin scale).

Identify interactions across time scales.
One of the appeals of ACRR as a site is that the logging history is well known. This is clearly of importance to, for instance, the sediment dynamics today. What is less clear, for many environmental scientists, is the extent to which the geologic history and forcing (e.g. uplift rate) are important to understanding the short-term (year-century) dynamics. Can we simply take the present-day morphology and rock types as given for modeling the landscape? Or should we also know the long-term forcing? Assuming that forcing is important, we can use the ACRR system to demonstrate this, starting with cosmic radio- nucleide measurements of the uplift rate and synthesizing present knowledge of the bedrock geology. Spatial variability in uplift rate and geology could be critical in, for example, determining the ‘sheds’ for various grain sizes as well as rock-derived nutrients.

Comprehensive search for self-similarity.
The existence of self-similarity in any system is interesting in its own right as an indicator of scale-independent dynamics. In our case it is also of practical interest; for example, self-similarity is the foundation of LES modeling of turbulence. So self-similarity could be a key to getting the most out of our observations, which will always be spatially and temporally restricted. We should begin our analysis of the ACRR system with a comprehensive search for self-similarity including, besides the familiar morphologic similarity, a search for similarity in spatial ecosystem structure, nutrient flow paths (sheds), etc, including a search for thresholds and scale dependencies.

Comprehensive search for co-organization
Research during the last decade has conclusively shown a high degree of organization in the geomorphological structure of river basins. This organization has some important general and unifying characteristics which exist despite the infinite variety of shapes and forms that are observed in river basins. It seems likely that ecological patterns in vegetation, food webs, biota, etc, in river basins will also exhibit signatures that allow their quantitative unifying description across many different situations which represent an enormous variety of climate and geomorphological situations.

Despite the deep symmetry of structural organization in geomorphologic properties, the convergence of the biological, hydrological and geomorphic properties of river basins is one of the great relatively unexplored frontiers of the geo-ecological sciences.

We will search for the possible existence of the co-organization described above and to study the dynamics responsible for its characteristics once these are quantitatively characterized. The first obvious major task is the search for the signatures of ecological and hydrological organization around the template of the drainage network.