This team of investigators will examine responses of ecologically important plant and invertebrate species to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in six marshes in Louisiana and Texas. Early reports suggest that these marshes represent a gradient of disturbance levels. The PIs will take advantage of existing pre-hurricane data to evaluate the effects of hurricane-mediated disturbance on several measures of community structure and function. The PIs will measure sedimentation levels, vegetation structure, primary productivity, species interactions, soil chemistry; invertebrate population densities; and the recovery of selected species of macroinvertebrates. The causal relationships among these parameters, processes and community recovery will be identified where possible. The PIs will use a combination of previously established and new monitoring stations where they will gather data on a bimonthly basis during the critical window of time immediately following the hurricane.
The broader impacts of this research include an improved understanding of how large-scale disturbances affect marsh populations, communities, inter-specific interactions, food webs, and ecosystem function. In turn, the ability to predict the ecological and economic impacts of large-scale catastrophic events on fishery and species depends on understanding the links between disturbance, marsh primary productivity, decomposition, and, ultimately, vertebrate populations.
