PARENT SESSION
Special Session - Applying landscape ecology in forests of the northern Great Lakes region Chair(s): Saunders, Sari¹, ¹ Michigan Technical University, Houghton, MI
Wednesday, March 31, 2004 1:00 PM - 5:20 PM Apollo Room 2

The Great Lakes Region has been a focal area for landscape ecological research during the past decade. Landscape ecologists have studied the patterns of ecological processes, such as carbon flux, decomposition, and natural disturbance regimes; and compositional or structural features, such as the diversity of fauna and flora. The interrelationships among these variables have been examined within focal ecosystems at the landscape level and over the mosaic of multiple ecosystems at a regional level. Both retrospective work and predictive modeling of management impacts have been undertaken on a variety of landscape ecosystems. In our symposium, we anticipate synthesizing the major discoveries of several active research groups to assess how this research (1) enhances understanding of the functioning of managed landscapes; and (2) guides management and policy actions that strive to meet multiple goals for restoration, conservation, recreation, and resource extraction. The symposium will highlight both the limitations and successes of this research to knowledge and management of these intensely modified landscapes. We hope that lessons learned from these groups will also be explored by the general landscape ecology community to promote the development of the science and its applications.

A framework for analyzing terrestrial-aquatic interactions in a land-lake mosaic. ^*CARDILLE, JEFFREY A. ¹, CARPENTER, STEPHEN R. ², COE, MICHAEL T. ³, FOLEY, JONATHAN A. ³, HANSON, PAUL C. ², TURNER, MONICA G. ¹ and VANO, JULIE A. ³, ¹ University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA² University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA³ University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

ABSTRACT- Biogeochemical cycles in lakes and on land are relatively well understood, yet there are considerable gaps in understanding their interactions in extensive land-lake mosaics. The Northern Highlands Lake District is a spatially complex landscape dominated by diverse forests, wetlands, shrublands (together covering 89% of the surface area) and lakes (covering 11%) in northern Wisconsin and Michigan. We are developing a new model of hydrologic and nutrient fluxes within and among watersheds (n > 7800) to answer basic questions about the complete, integrated landscape: What are the controls of carbon and hydrologic cycling across the region? Are some lakes more important than others to the cycling of water or carbon? What are the relative importance of surface and sub-surface connections to our understanding of water and carbon cycling in the region? What is the importance and function of the spatial arrangement of lakes, and the groundwater and surface connections among them, to the variation in patterns of rates of chemical processing across the region? Using the Northern Highlands as a representative region, we describe a general framework for modeling each component, introduce the representations of key surface and subsurface connections, and discuss the variation of process rates across the region.

KEY WORDS: terrestrial, aquatic, model, lake, forest, pattern, interaction