Baisman Run: Co-evolution of water, carbon and nutrient cycling in a suburbanizing watershed

Abstract:

Land use change at the edge of cities has had a profound impact on watersheds and receiving water bodies over the past several decades. Rapid development and out-migration from urban centers to the suburbs, extending into the exurbs, have transformed land cover, land management, and the sources and sinks of nutrients and sediment. In the eastern United States new housing and commercial development typically has occurred on former agricultural or forest land, with much of the forest land derived from regrowth on abandoned agricultural land. Baisman Run is a 4 km² watershed that developed from agricultural land into low density suburban and forest land over the last several decades, and is a primary research catchment of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), a Long Term Ecological Research site. Prior to the BES, the watershed was studied for decades by Reds Wolman of the Johns Hopkins University and generations of graduate students. This legacy provides a rich, multi-disciplinary data set to study the interactions of hydrology, vegetation, biogeochemistry, and land management over a multi-decadal time scale. We use a combination of long term stream monitoring, results of field experiments, and numerical simulation to understand the interactions of decreasing atmospheric deposition, altered fertilization practices, increased septic loading, and stream channel and floodplain dynamics on coupled terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem processes, with an emphasis on nutrient cycling, retention, and export over a multi-decadal time domain.