Legacy of FEF science on governmental policies
Research at FEF has improved forest management policies in eastern US deciduous forests, including regional best management practices (BMPs), such as minimizing road construction impacts on erosion and sedimentation (Kochenderfer, 1970) and protocols to test the efficacy of the BMPs (Ryder & Edwards, 2005). It has also documented the effects of regional air pollution on forests and the effectiveness of Federal policies to reduce its impacts. There is no doubt that continuing monitoring and long-term experiments in the FEF is crucial for the ongoing improvement of policies aimed at maintaining a resilient ecosystem.
Available Data:
Core datasets of the FEF include long-term hydro-climatological data for five gauged watersheds, with measurements starting in 1951. Five watersheds were added later. Daily time series of air temperature, precipitation, streamflow, and biweekly precipitation and stream chemistry data are publicly available from the Forest Service [https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/ef/locations/wv/fernow/data/]. Data are quality-controlled and curated by the FEF data manager. Growing season (June – October) soil moisture measurements for surface (0-5 cm) mineral soils in WS 3, 4, and 7 are available for 2007-2019 [http://www.as.wvu.edu/fernow/data.html]. Also available are almost three decades (1964 – 1991) of pan evapotranspiration data sampled daily during the growing season (April to September/October). FEF is a member of several national environmental monitoring networks: Climate and Hydrology Database Projects (CLIMDB/HYDRODB) [https://climhy.lternet.edu/] focused on long-term meteorological and streamflow records; Smart Forest [http://smartforests-data.sr.unh.edu/data/gce/Fernow/data/] a network of digital, high frequency and real-time environmental data; and the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) [http://nadp.slh.wisc.edu/data/sites/siteDetails.aspx?net=NTN&id=WV18] and Clean Air Status and Trends Networks (CASTNET) [https://www3.epa.gov/castnet/site_pages/PAR207.html] which provide some of the longest records of wet and dry deposition in the U.S., respectively. For 15 years, research at the FEF has been supported by the NSF LTREB (Long Term Research in Environmental Biology) program, which has resulted in important data contributions on the whole-watershed acidification and Long-Term Soil Productivity experiments [http://www.as.wvu.edu/fernow/data.html]. Associated metadata can be found in the aforementioned references and websites. Finally, data from short-duration studies at the FEF are also available including sapflow in WS4 (growing seasons 2017 and 2018), and a growing database of hyperspectral and hyper-spatial resolution remote sensing datasets (e.g. Fang et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2015).
Future Directions
Advancing forest ecosystem management is a major challenge for this century and an imperative for the future sustainability of forest and water resources (Ellison et al., 2017). Moreover, current and future environmental and societal challenges (e.g. climate change; novel diseases; population growth; megadisturbances; and environmental justice) require open data science approaches and higher levels of collaboration. Forested uplands have long been relied upon as sources of clean water, while at the same time suffering from resource extraction and environmental pollution. Therefore, FEF encourages future research and collaboration that propels science-based information to protect water flow regimes and water quality, while maintaining other important ecosystem and economic services like timber production and recreation. Future research avenues may include: i) Linking hydrology and nutrient cycling within a catchment - Ecohydrological coupling and separation (i.e. testing the “two-water worlds” hypothesis (Berry et al., 2018) and its implications for water quality); ii) Studying water balance dynamics over time, focusing on storage (soil moisture) and evapotranspiration (sapflow and interception); iii) Linking documented changes in forest composition to present and future susceptibility to drought/climate change (building on Young et al. 2019); iv) Understanding recovery from ecosystem acidification (following cessation of fertilizer additions to WS 3 in 2021); and v) Use of long-term records and Empirical Dynamic Modeling (Sugihara et al., 2012) to explore the causal influence of environmental change and vegetation productivity (using tree-ring records) on hydrology and ecosystem structure (e.g. Watson, 2018). Building on the substantial outcomes of past research that shaped hydrologic management (Vose et al., 2012) and silvicultural practices (Barrett, 1995) of the Appalachian Mountain region, a strategic plan for future research will provide the critically needed knowledge on the interactions between climate, streamflow, and forest management practices that will usher in a new era of forest ecosystem management in Appalachia and beyond.