Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research Hawai'i
Ecosystem Responses to Environmental Change (EREC) Focal Area
The EREC team concentrates on two research areas that are of national importance and in which Hawaii is well positioned to become a national leader: (1) Ecological Analyses in Altered Environments, and (2) Biogeographic and Landscape Ecological Analyses. Hawaii is a world model as an ecological showcase containing a biota that is virtually entirely endemic, which evolved across a dramatic range of habitats comprising ecosystems linking land and sea.
EREC researchers take advantage of the diverse marine and terrestrial environments and strong environmental gradients of the Hawaiian Islands to analyze how natural and anthropogenic habitat changes have impacted native and invasive species, community structure, and ecosystem processes. EREC researchers examine the impacts of large-scale ecosystem changes brought about through climatic variability, landscape-scale anthropogenic disturbances, and species introductions. Within a landscape, understanding ecological connections across various spatial, and temporal scales has obvious importance for the sustainability of local terrestrial and aquatic communities, but such complex processes are scientifically challenging due to the large number of inputs. The mountain-to-sea landscapes of the Hawaiian Islands are characterized by a broad array of ecosystems within a small area, representing an essentially self-contained ecological system that is an ideal model to study ecosystem functionality, understand and predict the effects of humans, and develop remediation and sustainable management. Major infrastructure projects include the establishment and inventorying of large, permanent forest plots across environmental gradients, mountain-to-sea studies of ecohydrology and water flow, and development and analysis of species interaction webs for pollinators across natural and anthropogenic habitats.
Scientific leaders of the EREC Focal Area are
Dr. Tracy Wiegner (wiegner@hawaii.edu ) at UH Hilo and
Dr. Curt Daehler at UH Manoa.
(daehler@hawaii.edu Website: http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/daehler/ )
Dr. Rebecca Ostertag at UH Hilo leads the Hawaii Permanent Plot Network (HIPPNET)
(ostertag@hawaii.edu Website: http://www.hawaii.edu/uhhbiology/index.php?page=person&id=21 )
Laboratory facilities supported by IMUA II are located at:
Link to Analytical Laboratory Facility: http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~analab/
