The southern Appalachian mountains are highly erodable and subject to multiple disturbances. Natural disturbances include hurricanes, floods, droughts, insect and disease outbreaks, ice storms, windthrow, and fire whereas anthropogenic disturbances include two centuries of impacts from steep mountain agriculture, grazing, forest clearing, and rapidly expanding residential and recreational use. Streams and forests have exhibited an ability to partially return to their original state following disturbance. Current research focuses on identifying and quantifying these long-term changes in stream and forest ecosystem structure and function.

      Terrestrial research is organized across the landscape with elevations ranging from 678 to 1592 m along the complex environmental gradients created by abiotic factors including elevation, aspect, precipitation, and temperature. Terrestrial processes including productivity, decomposition, soil nitrogen mineralization, photosynthesis, respiration, herbivory, seed rain, and seedling demography are quantified along this gradient. This gradient approach allows the functional relationships between variables to be defined and also allows the variables to be extrapolated to the larger landscape of the southern Appalachians.

        Aquatic research at Coweeta is facilitated by the detailed characterization of hydrologic regimes in small (3 ha) to large (760 ha) watersheds, some of which have been monitored since 1934. These catchments provide one of the longest continuous hydrologic records in the world. Aquatic research has investigated the influences of water chemistry, decomposition, organic detritus dynamics, and stream bed morphology on the relationship of stream primary and secondary productivity, trophic levels, micro- and macro-arthropod populations, and fish abundance and diversity.