Project: Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research site

From http://www.lternet.edu/sites/fce and http://fcelter.fiu.edu/:
The majority of Florida Coastal Everglades LTER sites are located in freshwater marsh, estuarine mangroves, seagrass estuary ecosystems in Everglades National Park. FCE LTER research focuses on understanding ecosystem processes along the two major drainage basins in Everglades National Park: Shark River Slough and Taylor Slough. FCE LTER investigators are particularly interested in the dynamics at the estuarine ecotone, where freshwater and estuarine wetlands meet. This ecotone is dynamic in the landscape in response to changing freshwater inflow (with Everglades restoration), sea level rise (climate change responses), and disturbance (particularly hurricanes and fire).

The FCE LTER was established in 2000 when NSF expanded the LTER network to include 3 new coastal sites. FCE research questions focus on how changing freshwater inflow, sealevel rise and climate change, and disturbance interact to control ecological pattern and process in oligotrophic ecosystems. These questions tend to focus on the oligohaline ecotone region of the coastal Everglades. The entire FCE LTER site is enclosed in Everglades National Park, which at over 4300 square kilometers is the third largest wilderness in the lower 48 states. The FCE LTER includes 17 permanent sites located along two transects oriented with the natural flow of water.

The program is based at Florida International University and includes 64 senior scientists and 80 students from 26 institutions.

FCE LTER Data: The Florida Coastal Everglades (FCE) LTER data are managed by and available directly from the FCE LTER project data site URL shown above. If there are any datasets listed below, they are data sets that were collected at or near the FCE LTER sampling locations, and funded by NSF OCE as ancillary projects related to the FCE LTER core research themes.

This project is supported by continuing grants with slight name variations:

• LTER COERCE-Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystems Research, the Everglades. Regional Controls of Population and Ecosystem Dynamics in an Oligotrophic Wetland-dominated Coastal Landscap
• FCE LTER II: Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystems Research
• LTER: FCE III - Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystems Research