RAPID: Extreme Weather Effects on Southern Appalachian Terrestrial Food Webs

This project will test how different trophic levels within forest floor food webs react to extreme disturbance and how this reaction could impact the health of forest ecosystems. Food webs are key to understanding how species are distributed across space and time. Yet, many studies of food webs lack a spatial or temporal component. It is important to understand whether food webs are resilient to extreme events. For example, the loss of predators at the top of the food web can cause a chain reaction that reduces biodiversity at lower trophic levels. In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Southern Appalachian forests, causing severe flooding, mudslides, and uprooting trees. Many areas got a lot of rain in 72 hours, with some places receiving 40-60% of their annual rainfall during the storm. This heavy rain likely flooded underground shelters for many organisms, severely affecting forest floor communities. This project will study how a diverse assemblage of organisms reacts to an extreme disturbance to learn how resilient food webs are in nature. This research will give insight into food web stability and will predict how food webs might respond to more frequent disturbances. Additionally, this research will train multiple students and recent post-baccalaureate assistants from the hurricane impacted region. Student researchers will be involved in the research to prepare them for scientific careers. Those researchers will be representative of the American public that they communicate the results to using an art display.

This research project will leverage data collected before Hurricane Helene on Southern Appalachian food webs to answer questions about forest food web resiliency in the face of extreme climate events. This project focuses on a diverse group of consumers, terrestrial salamanders, because they have a biomass greater than all other forest consumers combined, salamanders are a major pathway for energy and nutrient flow in forest food webs. The project will test how landscape heterogeneity and disturbance affect the resilience of food webs and how the structure of food webs changes following disturbance. Field surveys will be used to reassess the changes in food web structure after the hurricane, and a manipulative field experiment will assess the top-down effects of apex predator removal on lower trophic levels. This work is important because the effects of reshuffling food webs across the landscape are unknown for many ecosystems, as are the long-term effects of rare but extreme disturbances.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2510441
Principal Investigator: Jon Davenport
Funds Obligated: $199,758
State: NC