Among the many research results from LTER sites, some findings stand out as being particularly important to achieve the LTER goal of providing information to conserve, protect, and manage the nation's ecosystems. Short descriptions of key findings at each site emphasize the importance of long-term data in understanding the pace and pattern of ecological change.
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Informing Urban Policy (CAP LTER) Ecosystem services are the benefits that people receive from their life-supporting environment. These include the "goods" that nature provides to us (i.e. food, water, fiber, energy) as well as soil fertility, air and water quality, pest control, recreation, and aesthetics. Natural systems deliver these services, but humans have also designed or engineered ecosystems to deliver specific services... Read more |
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New Ecological Theory (CAP LTER) For most of ecology's history as a discipline, the focus of study was on pristine, wildland sites. Urban areas were seen as human-disturbed places less worthy of investigation. Urban ecology experienced a paradigm shift in the latter part of the 20th century, when it began to focus on the structure and function of cities as ecosystems. The establishment of two long-term ecological research sites... Read more |
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Urban Biodiversity (CAP LTER) Most ecological theories are based on ecological patterns and processes in non-urban and less human-dominated environments. As cities grow and the global population becomes more urban, ecologists need to test their theories in urban settings and modify them, or even develop new ones, to reflect the ecology of cities. CAP scientists have used the special characteristics of urban food webs (i.e... Read more |
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Urban Heat Island Effects (CAP LTER) The Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI) is when a city is significantly warmer than the outlying rural area due to the preponderance of concrete and asphalt surfaces that store heat during the day and release it at night. While urban heat islands exist in most large cities, the Phoenix metropolitan area has presented a special case for the study of this phenomenon because of its rapid growth over the... Read more |
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Food Web Base (CCE LTER) Every second breath you take is courtesy of the phytoplankton -- the tiny single-celled photosynthesizers in the ocean. The oxygen the phytoplankton produce has allowed the proliferation of life on earth, while the carbon dioxide they fix into organic carbon helps to regulate the planet's climate, and forms the base of nearly all ocean food webs. So it is clearly important to know how fast the... Read more |
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Iron Importance (CCE LTER) It has been known for over a decade that the limiting micronutrient iron, supplied from shelf sediments, can fuel the productivity of the nutrient-rich coastal upwelling systems of central California. The significance of iron supply as a factor in community production in the more nutrient-poor waters of southern California, however, has been unstudied. Conventional wisdom would suggest that,... Read more |
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Marine Ecosystem Services (CCE LTER) Sustained, high quality ocean measurements have been made in the California Current System for over 60 years, thanks to the far-sighted work of CalCOFI (the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations). This extensive program initially surveyed the ocean from Baja California, Mexico to the state of Washington, although today it samples a more restricted region from San Diego to San... Read more |
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New Climate Pattern (CCE LTER) Research in the CCE LTER site led to the discovery of a new mode of climate variability that has been named the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO, Di Lorenzo et al. 2008). The NPGO was initially uncovered through the analysis of a computer model of ocean circulation, developed to reproduce and diagnose long-term climate measurements in the North Pacific. The study revealed variation in sea... Read more |
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Upwelling Matters (CCE LTER) Years of previous research have focused on the process of coastal upwelling close to the continental boundary of the west coast of North America. A new study led by CCE-LTER (then) graduate student Ryan Rykaczewski and his advisor David Checkley identified, for the first time, important ecosystem contrasts between the strong nearshore upwelling in the classical coastal boundary region and the... Read more |
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Clean Water and Land Markets (CWT LTER) The growing population and increased consumption rates of the last hundred years make clear that we no longer have the luxury of using economic models that externalize environmental costs as if natural resources were infinite. The rapidly growing population in North Carolina- estimated to increase by 50% over the next quarter century and affect up to 8 million acres of natural land- is a prime... Read more |
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Climate Change and Habitat (CWT LTER) Ecologists have long been interested in how patterns of species distribution and diversity shift with changing climates, a concern that has spiked as the reality of rapid global climate change becomes increasingly apparent. Knowing whether certain species are threatened by shifting climate patterns is important for planning management activities and predicting how ecosystem functions can change... Read more |
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Controlling Plant Invaders (CWT LTER) Invasive species are changing the structure and function of our native ecosystems, there is a need for effective management of these species to protect ecosystem services and biodiversity. Through a desk study which collated all published research on the primary plant invader of forests across 25 U.S. states, Microstegium vimineum, Coweeta researchers showed how ecological theory can be used to... Read more |
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Forest Biodiversity (CWT LTER) Simple models predict that biodiversity of forests should be much lower than that actually observed. Because only a few limiting resources are evident for trees, simple models would indicate that a forest would ultimately stabilize with only the few species that are the strongest competitors for the few available niches. However, observed diversity is much higher. High-dimensional regulation (... Read more |
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Future Nitrogen Cycling (CWT LTER) Understanding how global change will affect patterns of nitrogen (N) loss from forests is an area of special importance for researchers. Atmospheric deposition of N associated with anthropogenic activities and the sensitivity of microbial processes that convert organic N to plant available forms to temperature both point to the likelihood of increased N export from forests as increased rates of... Read more |
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Predicting Regional Climate (CWT LTER) Predicting the impact of climatic changes on biota and ecological processes hinges on accurate projections of regional climate change. Researchers have already shown that there exists enormous variation in the manifestation of global climate change from region to region, with different areas of the globe experiencing widely varying shifts in climate patterns. Perched precariously in the middle of... Read more |
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Scaling Up to the Catchment (CWT LTER) Though Coweeta became one of the first LTER sites in 1980, the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory as funded by the United States Forest Service has been in existence since 1934. Today the LTER and the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory coexist in the same complex of buildings and laboratories, collaborating and sharing data that now spans nearly eight decades. This data set has given Coweeta researchers... Read more |
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Communication to Policymakers (FCE LTER) The Everglades is imbedded in a human-dominated landscape that is constantly changing in response to local and global environmental manipulations. Working with an inter-governmental task force, FCE has helped create a reporting system linking the causes and consequences of these dynamics and communicating the results in a transparent format accessible to a wide audience. This reporting system has... Read more |
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Food Webs (FCE LTER) Determining the sources, fate, and transport of dead organic matter is an important aspect of understanding the linkages between freshwater and marine environments in estuaries such as the Everglades. Comparative work among aquatic sites in the LTER network has shown that the dissolved form of organic matter is abundant in the Everglades but less biologically available compared to other estuaries... Read more |
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Productivity Gradients in Mangroves (FCE LTER) Mangrove forests in the Florida Everglades form an ecotone, which is a critical link between freshwater marshes and the marine environments of Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. These forested wetlands provide shoreline protection against storms, "nurseries" for shrimp, fish, and crabs, as well as habitat for several endangered and threatened species such as the American crocodile. FCE... Read more |
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Productivity Paradox (FCE LTER) FCE researchers have found that productivity in the Everglades, and other limestone-based Carbbean wetlands, is dominated by extraordinarily productive algal mats, despite extreme nutrient limitation. This phenomenon has been called a "productivity paradox" (Gaiser et al. 2011). This production would be expected to support a large biomass of aquatic primary consumers but does not (Turner et al.... Read more |
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Unique Nutrient Sources (FCE LTER) FCE research has shown that the Everglades operates differently from other coastal ecosystems in that its estuaries that are "upside-down", with seawater supplying limiting nutrients landward, rather than the other way around. Collaborative research with Caribbean scientists, particularly those associated with Mexican LTER programs (MexLTER), has shown similar upside-down features in similar... Read more |
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Microbes and Nitrogen (GCE LTER) Modern molecular techniques have vastly increased our ability to catalogue molecular diversity, but do not reveal how this diversity affects ecological processes. GCE-LTER researchers (in collaboration with researchers funded by the NSF-funded Sapelo Island Microbial Observatory and the Moore Foundation) have combined state of the art molecular methods with ecological studies to explore both... Read more |
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Nitrogen to the Coast (GCE LTER) The export of excess nitrogen input from rivers has been identified as one of the most significant problems facing coastal ecosystems, resulting in eutrophication and adverse environmental effects such as hypoxia and harmful algal blooms. Researchers at the GCE LTER constructed nitrogen budgets for the watersheds of all the major rivers in the southeast to determine the total input of nitrogen as... Read more |
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Salt Marsh Herbivores (GCE LTER) It is obvious to the most casual observer that natural communities are different in different parts of the world. Early naturalists from Europe, for example, marveled at the diversity of life that they found on trips to the tropics. Ever since, scientists have wondered how ecological processes might vary geographically. Early workers suggested that interactions between species might be more... Read more |
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Sea Level Rise (GCE LTER) Global climate change is predicted to cause extensive changes in the earth's ecosystems. Sea level rise (SLR) currently averages 3 mm yr-1, but is expected to accelerate over the coming century. Some of the habitats most vulnerable to SLR are tidal wetlands, which exist at the interface between land and sea. Decades of research at the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems (GCE) LTER has shown that coastal... Read more |
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