Environmental and Biological Monitoring

The purpose of the Environmental Monitoring Program at Archbold is to collect, manage and distribute freely a wide range of climatologic, hydrologic, atmospheric, and biotic data with high spatial and temporal resolution, to inform scientific research, track long-term environmental change in south-central Florida, and contribute towards regional, national and international monitoring networks that detect global trends.

nvironmental and biological monitoring is essential to provide background data for Station projects. Some Station datasets date back to 1931. These long-term data are used frequently by staff and visiting scientists, as well as state and federal agencies. For example climate data are important for guiding research and management decisions, and weather data to plan prescribed burns. Station staff continues data collection for a variety of long-term monitoring projects under the broad categories of Climate, Hydrology, Atmospheric, Species, and Landscape. Archbold’s goal is to make most environmental monitoring data, and associated metadata, available publicly via the Station Data/Metadata web pages. Archbold’s Data Manager is working assiduously on a long-term plan to achieve this goal. Main Grounds weather data are already available, and extensive state and federal data collected at Archbold are available largely via links to government web sites.

Archbold Biological Station environmental data are collected as part of broader monitoring frameworks at regional and global scales. This allows us to contribute towards and state, federal and international analyses to understand global and regional change: identifying common patterns of change; developing regional and global syntheses of change; partitioning the variances between global and site-specific functions; and developing approaches to scaling up (and down) from local to regional to global spatial scales.

ur environmental data contribute directly towards programs at a state level including:

• South Florida Water Management District (hydrology/climate)
• Southwest Florida Water Management District (hydrology/climate)
• Florida Department of Environmental Protection (atmospheric/water quality)
• Florida Natural Areas Inventory (species/ natural communities)

and at a federal level:

• US Geological Survey (hydrology/water quality/ atmospheric/ climate)
• NOAA both CRN and NWS (climate/weather)

Archbold Biological Station and the Archbold Reserve are contributing members of a number of research coordinating networks including:

• GLEON – global lakes ecological observatory network
• NEON – National Ecological Observatory Network, specifically the Southeast Ecological Observatory Network (SEON)
• OBFS – coordination efforts among the membership of the Organization of Biological Field Stations