LUQ LTER Newsletter
July 2007

Charles Hall

New Publication

LeClerc, G. and C. A. S. Hall. (2007). Making world development work: Scientific alternatives to neoclassical economic theory. (Book- 645 pp.) University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. $100. (see attached)

Randall Myster

Juan Felipe Blanco
(former Fred Scatena's Ph.D. student, currently Assistant Professor at Universidad de Antioquia , Colombia )

New projects & grants

"GORGONA ISLAND STREAM BIOASSESSMENT: Hierarchical controls of macroinvertebrate distribution, abundance, and diversity in pristine insular streams" funded by Universidad de Antioquia ( Colombia ), Research Committe, University-wide Competition.

Gorgona Island is the only continental island off Colombian Pacific coast. This island, nearly the size of "El Yunque" and a national park since 1980, holds more than 25 permanent streams year-round feed by cloud and rain forests. As at any other tropical island, streams at Gorgona are dominated by diadromous fauna as well as aquatic insects. However, the spatial and temporal patterns and controlling factors of these assemblages have not been studied to date. This project is aimed to understand such patterns and to initiate cross-site comparisons with the LUQ-LTER site. Fred Scatena will serve as an international advisor. I acknowledge that my past research experiences as grad student and postdoc at the Biocomplexity project were instrumental for this grant proposal.

New publications and dissertation papers

Blanco, J. F. & F. N. Scatena. 2007. The spatial arrangement of neritid snails (Neritina virginea, Gastropoda: Neritidae) in a split-channel reach. River Research and Applications 23: 235-242.

Blanco, J. F. 2006. Fauna nativa migratoria en los ríos de Puerto Rico . In: T. M. Lopez y N. Villanueva (Ed.). Atlas Ambiental de Puerto Rico. Ed. Universidad de Puerto Rico .

Blanco & Scatena. 2006. The distribution of a diadromous gastropod in Puerto Rico streams: hierarchical contribution of river-ocean connectivity, water chemistry, hydraulics and substrate. Journal of the North American Benthological Society, 25(1): 82-98.

Blanco & Scatena. 2005. Floods, habitat hydraulics and upstream migration of Neritina virginea (Gastropoda: Neritidae) in Northeastern Puerto Rico . Caribbean Journal of Science 41 (1): 55-74.

Matthew Larsen

Call for Abstracts

Matt is a co-convener for this meeting and would like to encourage LUQ LTER members to submit an abstract.

ASLO Meeting [American Society of Limnology and Oceanography] 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting (with AGU, TOS), Orlando, FL, March 2-7, 2008 [Abstract deadline: October 2007; see http://aslo.org/ for exact date]

SESSION TITLE: Ridge-To-Reef: Impacts of Watershed Change on Tropical Coastal Ecosystems

CO-CONVENERS: Michael Field, Matthew Larsen and Jonathan Stock, USGS

DESCRIPTION
Accelerating landscape changes in tropical watersheds are supplying increasing amounts of fine sediment to nearshore ecosystems. Agriculture, feral grazing, fires, and urbanization are altering the ecology, hydrology, geomorphology of tropical watersheds, resulting in drastic changes in the character, transport processes and volume of sediment delivered to coastal reef and nearshore environments. It is well accepted that reefs and other nearshore ecosystems in the US and globally are declining from a number of poorly understood impacts, and that sedimentation and nutrification are major contributors to that decline. Addressing these threats requires a coupled understanding of watershed and nearshore processes, including transport pathways through hillslopes and channels, the  fate of sediment and nutrients in the nearshore, and ecosystem responses (e.g., coral reef or mangrove ecological response to sediment loading).  

This session will focus on new advancements in understanding the causes, sources, and transport of sediment, pollutants and nutrients from altered tropical coastal watersheds and their fate and impact on adjacent tropical coastal ecosystems. Contributions of case studies, development of new technologies, and application of models that provide improved understanding of the linkages between watershed change and tropical coastal ecosystem health are especially encouraged from ecologist, hydrologists, geomorphologists, and coastal marine scientists.