Hurricane Irma effects on Florida Everglades Mangroves: Assessment of Resilience and Trajectories of Recovery

Disturbances are large-scale episodic events that create abrupt changes in community structure, regulate ecological processes, and generate biological legacies that interact with environmental conditions that can define the trajectory of ecosystem recovery process. Understanding spatiotemporal ecosystem responses to disturbances and how resilience maintains specific ecosystem states or leads to regime shifts is challenging and remains a significant knowledge gap in ecological theory. In neotropical northern latitudes such as south Florida, hurricanes are recurring high-energy disturbances in coastal regions that significantly change community structure and function of mangrove wetlands. Hurricane force winds change forest structure through defoliation, tree snapping, and uprooting, which in turn influence tree mortality, species composition, successional patterns, nutrient cycling, and potential loss in soil elevation. Our proposed research will test the extent and duration of hurricane impacts on species-specific responses, community and ecosystem trajectories, and resilience capacity (i.e., recovery duration and rate) in mangrove forests across the Everglades landscape.

Scholars @ ECU