Ecosystem Responses to Hurricanes Synthesis Workshop

Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi TX

Investigators

Abstract

Three major hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) made landfall in the United States during the fall of 2017. Catastrophic human, economic, and ecological effects occurred from the storm surge, saltwater intrusion, wind damage, and flooding. The number of storms, their intensity, the number that made landfall, and the catastrophic damage was remarkable. Global models predict hurricanes will increase and effected areas will change over the next century. Thus, synthesizing responses to severe tropical storm disturbances is needed to understand general patterns of impact and recovery. This award will provide workshop funds for researchers, experts, managers, and graduate students to develop a synthetic understanding of hurricane impacts on freshwater, estuarine, and terrestrial ecosystems. The proposed workshop will provide important opportunities for career advancement and training of underrepresented and early career scientists. The unprecedented landfall of multiple major hurricanes in the United States presents a rare opportunity to document generalizable patterns in ecosystem response to extreme disturbance. The workshop will leverage the significant investment of the National Science Foundation in Hurricane Research following the devastating impacts of storms Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017 to generate a novel cross-system disturbance ecology synthesis. The synthesis will result from three major activities including: recruitment and workflow design, a three-day workshop, and post-workshop analysis and synthesis. The workshop will bring together research teams studying multiple ecosystem types (estuarine, freshwater, terrestrial) and ecosystem responses (physical, biogeochemical, organismal ? mobile vs sedentary, microbial, animal, and plant) to these hurricanes. The participants will merge diverse datasets into a common statistical framework and conduct synthetic analyses to identify shared and unique responses to different types of hurricane stressors. Both workshop and post workshop activities will yield an understanding of how ecosystems respond to severe disturbance and contribute a generalizable conceptual framework that is applicable across ecosystems and ecosystem components. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.