Issue 5

Widening the Lens

Water Research at Coweeta Moves to New Levels

There’s a new buzzword in water research these days: “ecohydrology.” The idea is to blend the principles of ecology with traditional watershed hydrology to address the complex issues (invasive species, climate change, wildfire, urbanization, etc.) facing land managers charged with protecting water resources now and into the future.

The word might have been invented to describe what researchers at the SRS Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory near Otto, NC, have been doing for some time. Over the past several decades, Coweeta has taken an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how watershed ecosystems respond to natural and human-caused disturbances. Jim Vose, project leader and ecologist at the Coweeta unit, says “our basic philosophy is that if we understand how the ecosystem works—the interconnections between climate, vegetation, soils, and water—we can begin to develop management practices to deal with the consequences of disturbance. This approach requires integrating many scientific disciplines to understand the complex nature of both natural and managed forest ecosystems.”

An Ecohydrologic Approach to Insect Invasion

The hemlock woolly adelgid, an exotic insect smaller than a poppy seed, threatens to bring dramatic changes to Southern Appalachian forests. Despite an aggressive campaign to control the adelgids, people in the field think that many of the area’s hemlocks will be dead within the next decade, opening up the forest canopy and removing shade from cool mountain streams. Last year, Coweeta researchers set up experiments to look at the effects of hemlock death on riparian zones, and the water quality in the streams that drain out of the region’s headwaters. (...continued...)