9726986 Kaplan Over the past 30 years, the Stroud Water Research Center has developed and used long-term ecological data for White Clay Creek watershed in three interrelated areas of inquiry: biogeochemistry, microbial ecology, and macro-invertebrate ecology. These studies represent a unique documentation of the temporal variability in a protected Piedmont stream ecosystem. The depth and detail in these data provide the baseline for a wide variety of research projects concerning the dynamics of stream ecosystems, and are essential in the evaluation of long-term patterns of environmental change. This current project will (1) maintain existing watershed installations needed to continue acquisition of long-term data on White Clay Creek, (2) address the data management needs of the long-term research project, including making the data available to the research community, and (3) test hypotheses concerning stream ecosystem structure and function under stable and/or recovering conditions that can only be examined with long-term data. This study is valuable in that it provides a long-term perspective on how land use history and atmospheric deposition affect stream water quality, organisms in stream communities, and ecosystem structure and function.
