FACILITIES AND EQUIPMENT Facilities available to the VCR LTER investigators include the Oyster laboratory, the Department of Environmental Sciences laboratories, and two computing facilities (one housed in Environmental Sciences and the other in the Academic Computing Center). The Oyster laboratory is a renovated farm house, leased by the Department of Environmental Sciences from the TNC VCR. The laboratory is located near Oyster, Virginia. This house is suitable for use as temporary housing for 20 people, a field laboratory, and on-site administration. All necessary equipment for the field stabilization of chemical and biological samples are in place at the Oyster laboratory including: refrigerators, freezers, filtration equipment and pumps, ovens, muffle furnaces, balances, pH meters, salinometers, oxygen meters, and incubators. We also have the capability to analyze water, soil, and sediment for nutrient concentrations on site: A deionized water system and a Hitachi 200 UV-visible spectrophoto-meter have been installed. Three out-buildings at the Oyster laboratory are also available for the use by the VCR LTER. One of the buildings has been renovated and equipped as a shop to provide investigators with on-site ability to construct equipment. Another of the buildings contains ovens, muffle furnaces, and tables for drying samples and specimens. The third building is used for storage of field equipment. The basement of the laboratory has been renovated to provide areas for washing and sorting of field samples, and for storage of herbarium samples. In addition to the Oyster laboratory, the staffed, fully-equipped (electricity, sanitary facilities, kitchen, etc.) Machipongo Station, owned by the VCR TNC, is available for a daily use fee. The LTER has access to this structure to provide shelter for investigators working on Hog Island in case of an emergency. Computer support includes two PCs and an AT&T 3B2 UNIX microcomputer. The UNIX computer acts as an electonic mail server, permitting local dial-in access and periodically linking to computers at UVA to exchange electronic mail. The Department of Environmental Sciences laboratories are modern and well equipped. These facilities include several analytical laboratories, a clean lab (positive pressure, absolute air filtration, and laminar flow hoods), and a microbiology laboratory. Laboratory instrumentation includes a SpectraMetrics SpectraSpan IIIA direct current plasma emission spectrophotometer, a Dionex Model 14 ion chromatograph system for routine anion and weak organic acid analyses, a Dionex ion chromatograph system with post-column reactor and a Knauer UV-vis detector for transition metal analyses, a high-performance liquid chromatography pump used in conjunction with the UV-vis detector for analysis of dissolved organic compounds, a Dionex gradient eluent ion chromatograph system for the analysis of cations, Varex ROSA-1 automated sample injectors and Hewlette-Packard integrators for the ion chromatographs, an Instrumentation Laboratories model 751 dual-beam atomic absorption/atomic emission spectrophotometer equipped with a model 755 flameless atomizer (graphite furnace) and a model 254 automated sample injector, a Perkin- Elmer/Hitachi 200 UV-visible spectrophoto-meter, a dual-channel Technicon AutoAnalyzer II, and two Radiometer auto-titrator systems. Standard lab equipment includes pH meters, strip chart recorders, conductivity bridges, analytical balances, refrigerators, fume hoods, drying ovens, centrifuges, temperature-controlled shaker/water baths, and a muffle furnace. The Organic Geochemistry Laboratories in the Department of Environmental Sciences at The University of Virginia house the VG PRISM stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer which is coupled to a GC interface for GC/C/IRMS capability. Also coupled to the MS are automatic lines for the analysis of prepared gas samples CO2; a CHN (Carlo-Erba) and automated carbonate systems will also soon be interfaced. On order is an automated carbonate isotope preparation system. Other instrumentation included in these facilities are a HP 5890 GC coupled to a HP 5971A MSD which is capable of both EI and CI analyses. Also present are two automated sampler step gradient amino acid analyzers capable of ion exchange and reverse phase separations. The isotope laboratory also has vacuum lines for the off line isolation of gases for the analysis of oxygen isotopes in water, carbon and oxygen isotopes in shell and nitrogen and carbon isotopes in organic materials. The Department also maintains a completely equipped lab facility for microbial ecology. All necessary routine equipment for the proposed work may be found there, including autoclave, incubators, balances, ovens, centrifuges, spectrophotometers, pumps, etc. Specialized equipment includes two Zeiss Model 14 research microscopes with epifluorescence illumination, a Varian Model 3800 gas chromatograph with both flame ionization and electron capture detectors, a Beckman LS7500 liquid scintillation counter, an American Research Products HPLC, a Dohrmann TOC analyzer, and a Carlo-Erba C/N analyzer. Additional facilities in the department include the mineralogy lab which houses powder and singe crystal Philips X-ray diffractometers, research petrographic microscopes, and sample and thin section preparation equipment. Field equipment maintained by the department includes pH meters, flow cells, conductivity bridges, peristaltic sampling pumps, thief samplers, filtering apparatus, and flow meters. There is a complete shop for wood and metal working with a full-time engineer for design and fabrication of unique field and laboratory equipment. Laboratory for Isotopic Studies The field and laboratory equipment required by investigators associated with other insitutions will be provided by their respective Universities. The Department of Environmental Sciences has a Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) Laboratory which consists of 4 Sun SparcStation 1 workstations each of which is equipped with 28 MB of memory and a between 600 and 2400 MB hard disk and a PC. The PC and two of the SUN systems are equipped with 24-bit color displays (the other SUNs have 8-bit color displays). All computers are linked to the Internet via a 10 MB/S ethernet and 100 MB/S FDDI ring. Computers support ERDAS, GRASS, KHOROS and UNIRAS raster-based GIS and remote-sensing system and the ARC/INFO vector-based GIS system. Peripheral equipment includes an Eikonix 4Kx4K color scanner, three digitizing tablets (up to 36x48”), a Calcomp 1026 pen plotter, and a Tektronix 4696 color printer. Digital output and storage is available via a Pinnacle read-write optical disk drive (capacity 500MB), an Exobyte 8mm video-tape drive (2.3 GB), a SUN cartridge tape drive (150 MB) and a Cipher 9-track, 6250 b.p.i. tape drive (200 MB). All systems are networked to share resources. Systems are available 24-hours/day, 365 days per year and are backed up on a daily basis. Sun IPC and IBM RT UNIX workstations and a 486/33 PC are dedicated to data management activities. These are used to support information distribution services, running Gopher, World-Wide Web and Mosaic software. Information includes hypertext, searchable bibliographies and personnel directories, current weather, images of research sites, and listings of job and research funding opportunities.The daily and weekly LTER electronic mail calendars are also generated on the Sun computer. Ingres, DBASE IV and Clarion database software are supported on these computers Support for statistical analyses and other software needs are derived from the Academic Computing Center. Accounts for LTER researchers are available on an IBM 3090, running VM/CMS, and a large number of RS-6000 computers running AIX. An additional RS6000 computer with 128 MB or memory and 6 GB of disk, which supports up to 12 simultaneous ARC/INFO users is also available for use by LTER researchers. Supercomputer accounts are available on the Pittsburg supercomputer via a consortium arrangement. Sun workstations are also available in ACC computing laboratories. In addition, the center provides language and statistical software for PC’s via a Novell network. Software packages available through the ACC include: SPSS, SAS and MINITAB statistical packages, C, Pascal, FORTRAN and C++ languages, and IMSL and Matlab numerical analysis packages. Graphics support includes NCAR graphics, spreadsheets and SAS GRAPH. All computers are networked via a system of connected Ethernets to NSFNET (Internet), providing full electronic mail, read news, telnet and ftp support. SITE DESCRIPTIONS Our site description is included in the introduction to the Project Description section of the proposal. POLICY ON HUMANE CARE OF ANIMALS See following page.