LUQ Newsletter
February 2005

Paul Klawinski

New Project
Bill Mautz, Becky Ostertag (former Silver postdoc) and Paul Klawinski (former Zimmerman postdoc) received funding by Ecology, Ecosystems and EPSCoR for their proposal, "Effects of Mulitple Species Invasions: Albizia Tree and Coqui Frog Colonization of Hawaii". 

This is a grant that grew out of relationships forged during Paul and Becky's postdoc research in the LEF and has benefited from the mentoring of both of us by the entire group of LUQ LTER researchers.  Speaking for myself, I am grateful for the opportunities that the LUQ LTER have provided for me and how it has opened up a world of larger scale, integrated (Ecology thought Ecosystems should fund the grant and vice versa) ecology to me.  This probably would not have happened if the LUQ LTER did not exist.  You are a great group of people to work with.

Randall Myster

New Publication
Myster, R. W. 2004. Post-agricultural invasion, establishment and growth of Neotropical trees. The Botanical Review 70:381-402.

Whendee Silver

New Publication

Silver, W. L., A. W. Thompson, M. E. McGroddy, R. K. Varner, J. R. Robertson, J. D. Dias, H. Silva, P. Crill, and M. Keller. Fine roots dynamics and trace gas fluxes in two lowland tropical forest soils. Global Change Biology 11: 290-306.

Nick Brokaw

News

Mr. Scott Alexander, of the BBC, visited Puerto Rico to scout orgnisms and locations for a film about huricane impacts on ecoystems and other subjects.  He is especially interested in decomposition and soil organisms, and thus interested in the Canopy Trimming Experiment.  He will return with a film crew in May.

Charlie Hall

New Projects and Workers

Charlie Hall sent four recently graduated undergraduates to work at Luquillo for the summer and fall of 2004.  Two of the workers  (Jeff Pacelli and Jenny Lorango) worked (hard!) on the CIT project, and two (Katie Makarowski and Lindsey Cray) worked on a new project to try to measure leaf area index using four methods at many locations over the mountain.

Cathy Pringle

New Publications

Effie Greathouse, Ph.D. student with Cathy Pringle, successfully defended on January 31.  Two publications are in press:

Greathouse, E.A., J. G. March, and C. M. Pringle. Recovery of a tropical stream after a harvest-related chlorine poisoning event. Freshwater Biology.

Greathouse, E. A., and C. M. Pringle. A sampler for stream macroinvertebrates and organic matter occurring on boulders and bedrock in pools. Verhandlungen der Internationalen Vereinigung fur theorestiche und angewandte Limnologie.

Fred Scatena

Project Update

Emmanuelle M. Humblet, (EHumblet@sas.upenn.edu), an undergraduate student at UPENN who was in the El Verde REU program last summer received a Nassau Grant from UPENN to continue her summer research on vegetation and flood levels in Luquillo rivers.  She will be returning to the island in early March to complete her field project.

Bob Waide

New Projects

Bob Waide and Charlie Hall have been involved in discussions with the Caribbean Climate Studies group) at UPR-Mayaguez, with the goal of developing collaborative projects.  On going activities of the Mayaguez group can be viewed at http://www.cmg.uprm.edu/index.html.  Of particular interest to LTER researchers will be the results of the ATLAS mission, which will provide data on the LEF and the ATMOS web site.  We hope that our discussions will lead to one or more proposals focusing on climate dynamics in Puerto Rico.

Coastal LTER Research
The LTER Network will present research from coastal LTER sites at a mini-symposium at NSF on March 3.  The mini-symposium will be held in conjunction with the Executive Committee meeting from March 2-4.  In addition, separate meetings with USDA-Forest Service and Federal agencies interested in coastal research will aim to strengthen (in the case of Forest Service) or develop collaborations.

Executive Committee Openings 
The Executive Committee will have two openings this spring and two next spring.  This year, Peter McCartney’s term will end, and another information manager will be elected to replace him.  Karen McGlathery has filled the final year of Bruce Hayden’s term, and the EC is trying to prevail on Karen to stay on for a full term.  If she decides not to stay, her position will be filled by an open election.  It has been quite some time (at least seven years) since Luquillo was represented on the EC.

Eda C. Meléndez

Data Management
I participated in a data managers' tools workshop organized by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in conjuction with the LTER Network Office (LNO), held at the new LNO's facilities at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Participants included some LTER Information Managers, but the majority were people that are dedicated in managing their data at their home countries and/or projects. There were people from Taiwan and Brazil, and from other Universities like Cornell and Hawaii.

In the workshop, information management tools were presented to participants to document their data using EML and to deposit their data in the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) network, a national network for data sharing that facilitates ecological and environmental research (http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/fmt/doc?/nceas-web/informatics/. Also, a product for data analysis and synthesis that is currently under development was presented to us, that when done, seems that will be very promising in assisting the scientific community in this task. (http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/). It was a
very productive workshop that assisted me further in my task of converting our metadata database into EML.

Grizelle Gonzalez

LTER

The Network-level Biogeochemistry working group led by Dr. Indy Burke met in Ft Collins, CO in early Februrary.  Lists of all the working group participants and summary of the discussions can be found at:

http://intranet.lternet.edu/planning/index.php/Altered_Biogeochemistry

Accepted for publication:
Torres, J.A, and G. González. Wood decomposition in Puerto Rican Dry and Wet Forests: a 13-year case study.  Biotropica

In the acknowledgment section you will notice this ms. is also a tribute to the contributions of the lead author to science -- particularly the study of ants in Puerto Rico.  Juan died early last summer.

Barbara Richardson

Report from El Verde
Luquillo LTER Biodiversity Programme:
Wyeomyia mosquitoes in bromeliads, Barbara and Mike Richardson, Edinburgh, and Tom Zavortink UC Davis.

The mosqiuto larvae in bromeliads were previously determined in the literature as W. mitchelli, but John N. Belkin, collecting in 1970 in the Luquillo mountains and along the Central Cordillera, found this to be in error and that there were four different species, two of them on El Junque. Unfortunately Belkin died before he could describe these species.

Tom Zavortink a mosquito taxonomist from the Bohart Museum and the Richardsons, have been collecting in the LEF, Carite State Forest , and the Toro Negro State Forest, at sites recorded by Belkin and his students. It is hoped that these new species will now be described and named. The study of the general bromeliad fauna has also been extended into the State Forests.

Matt Larsen

New Publication

Larsen M.C., Webb, R.M., and Warne, A.G., 2005, How much water and suspended-sediment does a large tropical island shed during a major hurricane? Hydrologic and geomorphologic effects of Hurricane Georges, September 1998, Puerto Rico [abstract]: EOS, Transactions: American Geophysical Union, v. 86.

Abstract

On September 21-22 1998, Hurricane Georges, a category-3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, produced heavy rainfall, flooding, and landslides in the mountains and coastal plains of Puerto Rico. In general, rainfall, runoff, and sediment yield vary across the 8,711 square kilometer island of Puerto Rico because of an orographic barrier, the Cordillera Central. Mean annual runoff for the island is estimated to be 910 mm (equal to 8 billion cubic meters), which is about 57 percent of mean annual precipitation: 1,600 mm (14 billion cubic meters). Mean annual suspended-sediment discharge from Puerto Rico into surrounding coastal waters is estimated at 5.9 (+/- 3.2) million metric tonnes. The largely mountainous watersheds of the island are small (tens to hundreds of square kilometers), channel gradients are steep, and most stream valleys tend to be well-incised and narrow. Major rainstorms are intense but brief. As a consequence, flood waters rise rapidly (minutes to tens of minutes) with peak discharges several orders of magnitude above base discharge, and flood waters recede quickly (hours). Major storms transport a substantial portion of suspended sediment from uplands to the coast, based on data from a set of nine suspended-sediment monitoring stations representative of typical conditions
in Puerto Rico.
      During Hurricane Georges, U. S. Geological Survey and National Weather Service rain-gage networks recorded 2-day rainfalls that ranged from about 100 mm to 630 mm (average was 300 mm, equal to about 2.6 billion cubic meters of water). Many streams rose more than 5 meters, resulting in severe flooding in northern, southwestern, and western watersheds. Landslides dissected roads and isolated communities on both the northern and southern slopes of the Cordillera Central. More than twice the mean annual discharge flowed from some watersheds (approximately 1 billion cubic meters of water for the entire island) carrying with it one to six times the mean annual load of sediment from some watersheds. A total of approximately 2.4 million metric tonnes of suspended sediment were discharged from the island to the coastal areas and insular shelf, equal to
an average suspended-sediment yield of 280 metric tonnes per square kilometer. Suspended-sediment concentrations for streams draining the steeper, drier, and less vegetated southern watersheds were four to five times greater than the concentrations for streams draining the lower relief, wetter, and more vegetated northern watersheds. The runoff from this single storm was about 13 percent of mean annual runoff and was
responsible for about 40 percent of mean annual suspended-sediment discharge from the island.