Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune AEM-1 Hydrosphere Deployment Metadata

Critical military training and testing on lands along the nation’s coastal and estuarine shorelines are increasingly placed at risk because of encroachment pressures in surrounding areas, impairments due to other anthropogenic disturbances, and changes in climate and sea level. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) intends to enhance and sustain its training and testing assets and also optimize its stewardship of natural resources through the development and application of an ecosystem-based management approach on DoD installations. To accomplish this goal, particularly for installations in estuarine/coastal environments, the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) launched the Defense Coastal/Estuarine Research Program (DCERP) as a 10-year effort at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune (MCBCL) in North Carolina. The results of the second 5 years of the program (DCERP2) are presented in the DCERP2 Final Report. There were four overarching objectives of DCERP2. The first objective was to understand the effects of climate change impacts, including warming temperatures, variability in the hydrological cycle, storm events, and sea level rise on the coastal ecosystems at MCBCL from observations and measurements made over the 10-year program. The second objective was to understand the carbon cycle of the coastal and terrestrial ecosystems at MCBCL through a highly integrated sampling program. The third objective was to develop models, tools, and indicators to evaluate current and projected future ecosystem state changes and translate scientific findings into actionable information for installation managers. The last objective was to recommend adaptive management strategies to sustain ecosystem natural resources within the context of an active military installation. Data were collected to characterize the travel time of water and solutes through the tidal freshwater reach of the New River. Travel time of particles and solutes is fundamental for estimating their exposure to reaction sites where biogeochemical processes occur. Travel time provides the time scale for all subsequent calculations of biogeochemical process rates that alter constituent loads through this reach. This metric provides a convenient control volume across which to extrapolate process rates of denitrification and photomineralization of DOC. Analysis of this dataset is provided in Appendix D of Chapter 4 (AEM-4) in the DCERP2 Final Monitoring Report.