Baseline Monitoring

The Elwha River – located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington - is home to an iconic dam removal and ecosystem restoration project. The Elwha offers a unique setting to explore the ecosystem level effects of dam removal and river restoration because of its prominence, such as large sediment volume, several salmon populations, and pristine wilderness.

Maintaining a current understanding of ecological conditions is fundamental to the National Park Service in meeting its mission to preserve park resources in an unimpaired state for future generations. Ecological monitoring establishes reference conditions, which over time help to define the normal limits of natural variation, determine standards for comparing future changes, and identify the need...

This research theme coalesces studies of old-growth temperate forests in several major thematic areas including landscape and ecosystem controls on watershed nutrient export, wildfire disturbance legacies on biogeochemical cycling, and the imprint of tree species on soil nutrients in old-growth forests.