Geology topics

Jennifer L. Morse

Publications and source records attributed to Jennifer L. Morse.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2025

Urban heterogeneity drives dissolved organic matter sources, transport, and transformation from local to macro scales

Urbanization reshapes dissolved organic matter (DOM) sources, transport, and transformations through changes in vegetation, hydrology, and management of waste and water. Yet the impacts of urbanization on DOM are variable within and among cities. Predicting heterogeneous responses to urbanization is challenged by diverse human activities and underlying biophysical variation along stream networks. Using data from the 486 largest urban areas in the continental United States and seven focal cities, we identified macro and local scale urban gradients in social, built, and biophysical factors that are expected to shape DOM. We used these gradients and the literature to develop hypotheses about heterogeneity in DOM quantity and quality within and among cities. Interactions among landscape and infrastructure attributes across spatial and temporal scales result in heterogeneous responses in DOM. Characterizing and quantifying these inconsistent responses to urbanization in contrasting settings may help to better understand heterogeneity and identify generalities among urban watersheds.

continental United States↗

USGS2025

Overcoming challenges in mapping hydrography and heterogeneity in urban landscapes

Understanding how water moves through a watershed is one of the most fundamental yet often complicated aspects of hydrology, especially in urban areas. Urban infrastructure and water management alter natural hydrological pathways in developed watersheds, which can violate assumptions of a watershed approach to ecosystem science. We focus on two aspects of urban landscapes that often create challenges to model watershed processes within and among urban areas: (1) accurate delineation of urban flow paths and (2) consistent characterisation of the urban landscape within and among cities. Here, we describe these challenges and identify how certain components of these challenges can be addressed, highlighting examples and lessons learned in a project that is assessing scales and drivers of variability in dissolved organic carbon across five urban centres in the United States. Our goal is to facilitate a dialogue that will advance the applications of watershed approaches in urban ecosystem science by recognising and addressing these challenges. Our examples focus on the United States but could be applicable to similar urban challenges in other locations globally.

Florida, Massachusetts, Utah↗

USGS2005

Ecological science and sustainability for the 21st century

Ecological science has contributed greatly to our understanding of the natural world and the impact of humans on that world. Now, we need to refocus the discipline towards research that ensures a future in which natural systems and the humans they include coexist on a more sustainable planet. Acknowledging that managed ecosystems and intensive exploitation of resources define our future, ecologists must play a greatly expanded role in communicating their research and influencing policy and decisions that affect the environment. To accomplish this, they will have to forge partnerships at scales and in forms they have not traditionally used. These alliances must act within three visionary areas: enhancing the extent to which decisions are ecologically informed; advancing innovative ecological research directed at the sustainability of the planet; and stimulating cultural changes within the science itself, thereby building a forward-looking and international ecology. We recommend: (1) a research initiative to enhance research project development, facilitate large-scale experiments and data collection, and link science to solutions; (2) procedures that will improve interactions among researchers, managers, and decision makers; and (3) efforts to build public understanding of the links between ecosystem services and humans.

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment↗

USGS2004

Ecology for a crowded planet

Within the next 50 to 100 years, the support and maintenance of an extended human family of 8 to 11 billion people will be difficult at best. The authors of this Policy Forum describe changes that are required if we hope to meet the needs and aspirations of humans while improving the health of our planet's ecosystems. Problems as diverse as disease transmission and global climate change have benefited substantially from advances in ecology. Such advances have set the stage for emergence of a proactive ecological science in which social and political realities are acknowledged and attention is turned decisively toward the future. The ecological sciences must chart an understanding of how ecosystem services can persist given their extensive human use. Innovative research on the sciences of ecosystem services, ecological restoration, and ecological design must be massively accelerated and must be accompanied by more effective communication of ecological knowledge to society.

Science↗