FINAL REPORT Indicators of Ecological Change SERDP Project RC-1114C MARCH 2005 Virginia H. Dale Oak Ridge National Laboratory Form Approved REPORT DOCUMENTATION PAGE OMB No. 0704-0188 The public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing the burden, to the Department of Defense, Executive Services and Communications Directorate (0704-0188). Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to any penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. PLEASE DO NOT RETURN YOUR FORM TO THE ABOVE ORGANIZATION. 1. REPORT DATE (DD-MM-YYYY) 2. REPORT TYPE 3. DATES COVERED (From - To) 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER 5b. GRANT NUMBER 5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT NUMBER 6. AUTHOR(S) 5d. PROJECT NUMBER 5e. TASK NUMBER 5f. WORK UNIT NUMBER 7. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER 9. SPONSORING/MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSOR/MONITOR'S ACRONYM(S) 11. SPONSOR/MONITOR'S REPORT NUMBER(S) 12. DISTRIBUTION/AVAILABILITY STATEMENT 13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 14. ABSTRACT 15. SUBJECT TERMS 16. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF: 17. LIMITATION OF 18. NUMBER 19a. NAME OF RESPONSIBLE PERSON a. REPORT b. ABSTRACT c. THIS PAGE ABSTRACT OF PAGES 19b. TELEPHONE NUMBER (Include area code) Standard Form 298 (Rev. 8/98) Prescribed by ANSI Std. Z39.18 Final Report on Indicators of Ecological Change CS 1114C A research effort supported by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) Ecosystem Management Program (SEMP) Principal Investigator: Dr. Virginia H. Dale Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, Tennessee March 2005 Acknowledgements We thank personnel at the Fort Benning Military Installation for access to the study sites and much logistical support. John Brent made sure that we focused on management implications throughout the effort. Hugh Westbury, SEMP Host Site Coordinator, provided much logistical support. Theresa Davo, Patty Kosky, and Pete Swiderek helped with site identification, and Patty Kosky spent many days in the field with our team. Troy Key and Phil Bennet from the Fort Benning land management staff operated the bulldozers used for our experiments. Rusty Bufford located and scanned the orthrophotographs used in the study and provided data sets and explanations of those data. Discussions with Rob Addington, Wade Harrison, and Bob Larimore were helpful in interpreting our results. Graeme Lockaby helped with background soil and geology information. Emily Carter and the U.S. Forest Service assisted in particle size analysis. Richard Mitchell, Brian Helms, Ken Fritz, Stephanie Miller, and Adriene Burnette assisted in measurement of coarse woody debris, macroinvertebrate, and fish. Michael Fuller and Gary Hollon assisted in the field measures of water quality. We thank Ramie Wilkerson for the chemical analysis and Stacy Evans for help in the laboratory. Discussions about indicators with Barry Noon were helpful in developing some of these ideas. Waterways Experiment Station provided assistance with the study. Larry Pounds assisted with taxonomic identification of plants. Reviews of draft papers by Tom Ashwood, Hal Balbach, Chuck Garten, Linda Mann, and Brian Roberts were quite helpful. Gay Marie Logsdon and Linda O’Hara edited some of our manuscripts. Hal Balbach and Hugh Westbury were persistent in their efforts to make the experiment occur. Jennifer Ayers, John Dilustro, Sharon Hermann, and Keiran O’Hara helped with the field sampling of terrestrial data. Karmen Smith and Jordon Smith entered some of the field data. Paul Ayers provided the equipment to record the path of the bulldozer and translated the results into a GIS file. Jonas Almeida, Barbara Jackson, and Edward Sobek provided statistical advice. Bryan Black and Marc Adams provided assistance with the witness tree analysis. The project was funded by a contract from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) Ecosystem Management Project (SEMP) CS-1114C to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Project managers Robert Holst and William Goran were helpful throughout the study. The SEMP Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) provided useful suggestions. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by the UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05- 00OR22725. Participants in Research Jack Feminella and Kelly Maloney, Department of Biological Sciences, Auburn University — Stream macroinvertebrates Thomas Foster1, Anthropology Department, Pennsylvania State University — Historical land cover Patrick Mulholland and Jeff Houser2, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Aquatic ecology Lisa Olsen, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Geographic information and landscape analysis David White, Aaron Peacock, James Cantu, and Sarah McNaughton3, Center for Environmental Technology, University of Tennessee — Soil microbiology Virginia Dale, Dan Druckenbrod, and Suzanne Beyeler4, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Terrestrial and landscape indicators, integration Current Affiliation: 1 Associate Director of Cultural Resource Management, BHE Environmental, Inc., 11733 Chesterdale Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45246, USA 2 U.S. Geological Survey, Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, 2630 Fanta Reed Rd, La Crosse, Wisconsin 54603, USA 3 AEA Technology Environment, Building 156, Harwell, OXON, OX11 OBR, UK. 4 Illinois Natural History Survey, 279 Natural Resources Building, 607 E. Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL 61820, USA Executive Summary for Indicators of Ecological Change SERDP Ecosystem Management Project CS 1114C Principal Investigator: Virginia H. Dale March 2005 1. Background Some of the finest surviving natural habitat in the United States is on military reservations where land has been protected from development. However, military training activities often necessitate ecological disturbance to that habitat. Fort Benning, Georgia, contains active infantry training grounds and more than 65,000 ha of soils capable of supporting longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forest, a greatly reduced forest type in the North America. As longleaf pine forests are the primary habitat for the federally- endangered red-cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis), land managers at this installation have a dual charge both to maintain conditions for mechanized training activities and to conserve the integrity of this landscape. Characterizing how resource use and management activities affect ecological conditions is necessary to document and understand ecological changes. Resource managers on military installations have the delicate task of balancing the need to train soldiers effectively with the need to maintain ecological integrity. Ecological indicators can play an important role in the management process by providing feedback on the impacts that training has on environmental characteristics, The challenge in using ecological indicators is determining which of the numerous measures of ecological systems best characterize the entire system but are simple enough to be effectively monitored and modeled. Ecological indicators quantify the magnitude of stress, degree of exposure to stress, or degree of ecological response to the exposure and are intended to offer a simple and efficient method to examine ecological composition, structure, and function of whole systems. The use of ecological indicators as a monitoring device relies on the assumption that the presence or absence of, and fluctuations in, these indicators reflect changes taking place at various levels in the ecological hierarchy. Although few scientists deny the benefits that indicators provide to research and management efforts, three concerns jeopardize the use of ecological indicators as a management tool. • Management and monitoring programs often depend on a small number of indicators and, as a consequence, fail to consider the full complexity of the ecological system. By selecting only one or a few indicators, the focus of the ecological management program becomes narrow, and an oversimplified understanding of the spatial and temporal interactions is created. This simplification often leads to poorly informed management decisions. Indicators should be selected from multiple levels in the ecological hierarchy in order to effectively monitor the multiple levels of complexity within an ecological system. • Choice of ecological indicators is often confounded by management programs that have vague management goals and objectives. Unclear or ambivalent goals and objectives can lead to “the wrong variables being measured in the wrong place at the wrong time with poor precision or reliability” (Noss and Cooperrider 1994). Primary goals and objectives should be determined early in Executive Summary of Indicators of Ecological Change Page 1 the process in order to focus management. Ecological indicators can then be selected from system characteristics that most closely relate to those management concerns. • Management and monitoring programs often