Megan Fork's paper on the effects of DOC on denitrification in Florida rivers came out today in the year's first issue of Ecosystems. Congrats again Megan!

We've just heard from NSF that our proposal to study the wetlands of Big Cypress National Preserve will be funded!  The Big Cypress landscape is a mosaic of isolated wetlands, grasslands, and pine forests. The core observation that motivates our proposal is that the Cypress wetlands appear to be regularly spaced.  This sort of regular pattern occurs in dryland vegetation, in peatlands (including the nearby Everglades) and elsewhere, and is thought to arise from feedbacks that are spatially-dependent.  Basically, organisms improve the environment in their immediate vicinity, but that has the effect of making more distant locations unsuitable.  In Big Cypress, we think that cypress trees essentially capture water from the surrounding landscape by dissolving the limestone bedrock and creating wetland depressions.  Pretty smart! Testing this core hypothesis, and all of its pieces, requires an interdisciplinary team. My colleagues at UF, who are going to do most of the field work, include ecohydrologists, soil scientists, and organic and inorganic geochemists.  Brad Murray and I are in charge of developing a model of this landscape.  It's gonna be fun.

Meredith Steele's paper (with a long list of co-authors) on the surface water characteristics of US cities has been accepted at Ecosystems!  Congratulations Meredith!

Abstract: Earth’s surface is rapidly urbanizing, resulting in dramatic changes in the abundance, distribution and character of surface water features in urban landscapes. However, the scope and consequences of surface water redistribution at broad spatial scales are not well understood. We hypothesized that urbanization will lead to convergent surface water abundance and distribution: in other words, cities will gain or lose water such that they become more similar to each other than are their surrounding natural landscapes. Using a database of more than 1 million water bodies and 1 million km of streams, we compared the surface water of 100 US cities with their surrounding undeveloped land. We evaluated differences in areal (AWB) and numeric densities (NWB) of water bodies (lakes, wetlands, etc.), the morphological characteristics of water bodies (size), and the density (DC ) of surface flow channels (i.e. streams and rivers). The variance of urban AWB, NWB, and DC across the 100 MSAs decreased, by 89%, 25%, and 71% respectively, compared to undeveloped land. These data show that many cities are surface-water poor relative to undeveloped land; however, in drier landscapes urbanization increases the occurrence of surface water. This convergence pattern strengthened with development intensity, such that high intensity urban development had an areal water body density 98% less than undeveloped lands. Urbanization appears to drive the convergence of hydrological features across the US, such that surface water distributions of cities are more similar to each other than to their surrounding landscapes.