Influence Of Forest Fragments On Headwater Stream Ecosystems In Agricultural Landscapes

It is widely recognized that headwater stream ecosystems are intimately associated with riparian forests. Riparian forests trap sediment, filter nutrients, provide shading, and are sources of allochthonous energy for stream food webs. Reciprocally, streams fuel riparian consumers via aquatic-to-terrestrial fluxes of aquatic emergent insects. The widespread clearing of forests in agricultural landscapes, however, has led to a decoupling of forest-stream dynamics. Patches of forest in these landscapes are often small and isolated, but may retain important functional forest-stream linkages that are otherwise absent in the surrounding agricultural landscape matrix. In this dissertation I report on a series of studies with the goal of assessing the influence of forest patches on reciprocal linkages between forests and streams in agricultural landscapes.