9800129 Genereux The goal of the short-term project proposed here is to establish and begin monitoring the first permanent, high-quality streamflow measurement sites at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, the best-studied (with respect to ecology) and best-equipped field research station in the rapidly disappearing lowland tropical rainforest of Central America. The data will be used to: produce the first high-quality hydrologic budgets for two small watersheds at La Selva (this aspect is time-sensitive, in that it relies on linking up with ongoing measurements of rainfall and ET which are being carried out by other researchers and are funded for a specific period of time) test the hydrologic hypothesis, generated solely from geochemical data, that a significant portion of streamflow on one of the watersheds is the result of subsurface interbasin transfer of high-solute geothermal groundwater into the watershed begin production of chemical budgets (input and output) for the watersheds, recognizing that part of the input is probably in the subsurface (we expect the hypothesis above concerning geothermal groundwater to be accepted) begin preliminary, quantitative assessment of whether there are significant ecological differences that can be reliably attributed to hydrologic differences between the watersheds (this relies on ecological work being carried out by Catherine Pringle at the University of Georgia with separate funding).
