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Symposia
4: Ecosystem
ecology at the watershed scale: Linking biogeochemical cycles across the
terrestrial - aquatic divide
Tuesday,
August 9, 8 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 517a,
Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Organizers:
Emily Bernhardt (Emily.bernhardt@duke.edu),
Maury Valett
Description: Many of
the central tenets of ecosystem ecology have their origin in the small watershed
approach made famous by Likens and Bormann in the early 1970s. The original
definition of a watershed treated uplands and draining streams as an
“inseparable unit functionally”. However, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem
ecologists have been pursuing answers to many of the same questions about how
nutrients cycle through watersheds with insufficient awareness of the importance
of the interaction between upland, riparian, and lotic components. This
symposium calls for a reevaluation of the small watershed approach with a new
emphasis on understanding subsystem interaction and an expansion of watershed
perspectives to ever larger spatial scales.
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