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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The Ecology And Conservation Of An Urban Karst Subterranean Estuary, Robert J. Scharping Mar 2020

The Ecology And Conservation Of An Urban Karst Subterranean Estuary, Robert J. Scharping

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sulphur Springs is an artesian spring and part of the limestone karst topography of metropolitan Tampa, Florida, USA. Underlying this spring is an extensive cave system that hosts saltwater vents and conspicuous microbial biofilm communities. For decades, water from Sulphur Springs has been extracted and used to supplement public water supply and dry season flows in the Hillsborough River Estuary. This dissertation describes research conducted at Sulphur Springs to determine the impacts of urban land use on the underlying cave and downstream estuary ecosystems, and presents the use of this system as a model to fill certain ecological knowledge gaps. …


Uncertainties Associated With The Use Of Erosional Cave Scallop Lengths To Calculate Stream Discharges, Gregory S. Springer, Andrew Hall Jan 2020

Uncertainties Associated With The Use Of Erosional Cave Scallop Lengths To Calculate Stream Discharges, Gregory S. Springer, Andrew Hall

International Journal of Speleology

Scallops are extremely valuable indicators of past water flows in caves because they often record events that cannot be safely witnessed nor measured. Qualitatively, the inverse relationship between their lengths and formative water velocities is useful for determining how flow changes along a cave passage, but they are most valuable because they can be used to directly estimate actual water velocities and discharges. We explore the effects of sample size, measurement choices, and other methods commonly applied to the use of cave scallops in estimating cave stream velocities and discharges. We measured 100 scallops on a cave wall and find …