摘要：The relevance of the boundary concept to ecological processes has been recently questioned.Humans in the post-industrial era have created novel lateral transport fluxes that have not been sufficientlyconsidered in watershed studies. We describe patterns of land-use change within the Potomac River basinand demonstrate how these changes have blurred traditional ecosystem boundaries by increasing themovement of people, materials, and energy into and within the basin. We argue that this expansion ofecological commerce requires new science, monitoring, and management strategies focused on large riversand suggest that traditional geopolitical and economic boundaries for environmental decision making beappropriately revised. Effective mitigation of the consequences of blurred boundaries will benefit from abroad-scale, interdisciplinary framework that can track and explicitly account for ecological fluxes of water,energy, materials, and organisms across human-dominated landscapes
