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Organic Matter Budgets for Stream Ecosystems: Problems in their Evaluation

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Stream Ecology

Abstract

Since the pioneering work at Hubbard Brook (Fisher and Likens, 1972, 1973; Bormann et al., 1969, 1974; Bormann and Likens, 1979), there has been ever increasing interest in watershed budgets, both for total organic matter, usually expressed as carbon (Wetzel et al., 1972), and various ions (Fisher and Likens, 1973; Johnson and Swank, 1973; Swank and Douglass, 1975; Fisher, 1977; Webster and Patten, 1979; Fahey, 1979; Mulholland and Kuenzler, 1979; Gurtz et al., 1980; Mulholand, 1981). The primary interest in stream dynamics within a budget context has been in the rate of loss of organic matter from the land as well as storage and biological conversion of organic matter in the stream. Impetus for most studies has come from the realization that energetics of small streams (generally orders 1 to 3 [Strahler, 1957]) are heavily dependent on organic nutritional resources of terrestrial origin (Ross, 1963; Hynes, 1963; Cummins, 1974; Hynes, 1975). New insights into the structure and function of running water ecosystems and terrestrial-aquatic linkages (Waring, 1980) are based on the changing terrestrial dependence with increasing channel size (Cummins, 1975, 1977; Vannote et al., 1980; Minshall et al., 1983), varying stream-side vegetation (Minshall, 1978), and the dynamics of input, storage or processing, and output of organic matter (Vannote et al., 1980; Minshall et al., 1983; Elwood et al., 1982; Newbold et al., 1982 a, b).

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Cummins, K.W. et al. (1983). Organic Matter Budgets for Stream Ecosystems: Problems in their Evaluation. In: Barnes, J.R., Minshall, G.W. (eds) Stream Ecology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3775-1_13

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