The Georgia Rivers Land-Margin Ecosystem Research Program

Abstract

The Land Margin Ecosystem Research (LMER) Program in the United States is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation through two of its subsidiary units, Long Term Studies and Biological Oceanography. The LMER program was designed to address gaps in the coverage of certain ecosystems by multi-disciplinary teams, specifically the lack of studies of coastal boundary zones. Our Georgia interdisciplinary team effort is the newest of four such LMER sites around the United States. In the presentation I will describe our rivers and estuaries, discuss the aims and significance of our research questions and, fmally, provide an overview of our fmdings during the first two years. This expanded abstract is used to provide some comparisons and background material against which the research findings can be discussed in the oral presentation. It is a condensed version of a paper produced for a symposium in 1996 in Rostock, Germany (Wiegert et al., in press). A more detailed general comparison of the rivers and our preliminary fmdings will appear in Alber et al., (in preparation).