The Network Newsletter Vol. A recent National Science Foundation competition folded three land-margin studies into the LTER Network, which now totals 24 sites. All three projects are located in coastal regions, including Sapelo Island, Georgia, the Florida Everglades and Florida Bay in South Florida, and the coastal area of Santa Barbara, California. Among these, cultural eutrophication affects most U.S. coastal ecosystems.
Cultural eutrophication is defined as nutrient-enrichment of an ecosystem by human influences.
As a result, most coastal ecological research in the U.S. has been conducted in systems that are experiencing eutrophication. Aerial photograph of the Southern Everglades portion of Everglades National Park, looking through the coastal Everglades to the Florida Bay estuary. Ongoing restoration, looking east along the C111 canal in the Southern Everglades. Levees yet to be removed are in the foreground, and levees have been removed in the background to allow greater freshwater inputs into the marshes to the right. The guiding hypothesis behind our LTER research is that regional processes mediated by water flow control ecological dynamics at any location within the coastal Everglades landscape.