NSF Award
0120616
0120616<br/>Levandowsky<br/><br/>The purposes of this planning grant are: (1) to bring together a group of scientists with various specialties, from several universities, who have been studying salt marshes in the vicinity of the Hudson River estuary; and (2) to allow this group to interact with a group of scientists at Florida State University who are studying salt marshes in Florida. We wish to develop a proposal, to be submitted a year from now to NSF's Biocomplexity program, that will integrate our various skills and interests to explore the biocomplexity of these systems and the effects of urban anthropogenic stress upon it. We will develop a program using new mathematical approaches to analyze the connectivity of components of the marshes, and also the nature of inherent space and time scales in these systems. Regarding time scales, we will develop a research program to detect the existence of nonlinear, chaotic phenomena. The locations of the New York area marshes to be studied are: (1) the New York shore of the Arthur Kill, in Staten Island, highly impacted by oil pollution; (2) the Meadowlands of New Jersey, with high levels of mercury and other heavy metals; (3) Tuckerton, in Southern New Jersey, relatively unimpacted by anthropogenic sources. The group will hold several workshops at the Meadowland Environmental Research lnstitute's environmental center to which the FSU scientists will be invited, and will also participate in workshops held at FSU. At these workshops we will plan the scope and operational details of an eventual full scale research proposal.
