A new emphasis on process-based interactions and feedbacks within the North Inlet ecosystem will be carried out. The coupling of ongoing long-term sampling programs will process-based experiments and transect analyses across ecological gradients is planned. Based upon good descriptions of the long-term temporal variability in ecosystem structure, project emphasis will shift toward experiments designed to explain that variation. These process-oriented studies will concentrate on areas where marsh habitats are encroaching into the coastal forest. Transects within this watershed will be sampled to monitor spatial and temporal variations in nutrients, the deposition of organic matter, plant and animal biomass, fish migrations, and water movements. Select locations along a transect will provide insights on very long-term processes such as marsh evolution. These measurements will be combined with experiments on nutrient cycling, sedimentation, decomposition, primary production, fertilization, trophic dynamics and recruitment in a coordinated effort that emphasizes exchange and transformation process. Ecosystem models at a variety of spatial and temporal scales will be developed. They will characterize and summarize the complexity of the major structural and functional habitats within North Inlet, test hypotheses, structure our field experiments, and ultimately, be incorporated into large landscape/climate models. Models will focus our attention on general systems dynamics and the chemical, physical and biological interactions which regulate system level processes. This focus will, in turn, place the North Inlet LTER project in a strong position to evaluate the impacts of disturbance events (e.g., hurricanes), global climate change and regional land-use change on system processes at various scales. Key long-term datasets will be extended into a second decade. This continuity with the past provides the measurements of long- term variations in the estuarine structure, the indices by which change is observed. Statistical analyses of the short-term variability in these long-term data sets have shown that certain environmentally controlled parameters, such as chlorophyll concentrations or seasonal fish migrations, are reasonably predictable, while other more biological controlled parameters, such as the zooplankton abundance or recruitment success of benthos, were unpredictable and likely to vary greatly within and between seasons.
