Hubbard Brook LTER

Calcium Watershed Addition; Animal Population and Community Studies; Ice Storm Effects on Forest and Aquatic Ecosystems; Hubbard Brook Sandbox Studies; Snow Depth, Soil Frost and Nutrient Loss; Stream Ecosystem Research; Watershed 5 - Whole Tree Harvest; Transport and Fate of Trifluoroacetate; Regional Sugar Maple Study; Spatial patterns of tree species abundance; A Spatial Model of Soil Parent Material; Accumulation and Depletion of Base Cations in Forest Floors; Forest Floor Organic Matter following Logging in Northern Hardwoods; Is there missing S at the HBEF?; Increasing Atmospheric CO2 and Forest Water Use; The bedrock geology of the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest: Results of new 1:10,000 mapping; Characterizing fractured rock hydrology in the Mirror Lake Watershed

The HBEF was established by the USDA Forest Service, Northeastern Research Station in 1955 as a major center for hydrologic research in New England. In the early 1960's, Dr. F. Herbert Bormann and others proposed the use of small watersheds to study element cycling. In 1963, the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES) was initiated by Bormann and Drs. Gene E. Likens and Noye M. Johnson, then on the faculty of Dartmouth College, and Dr. Robert S. Pierce of the USDA Forest Service. They proposed to use the small watershed approach at Hubbard Brook to study linkages between hydrologic and nutrient flux and cycling in response to natural and human disturbances, such as air pollution, forest cutting, land-use changes, increases in insect populations and climatic factors.

The first grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to Bormann and Likens in 1963 to support the research of the HBES. Since that time there has been continuous support from the NSF and the USDA Forest Service. In 1988 the HBEF was designated as a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site by the NSF. On-going cooperative efforts among diverse educational institutions, private institutions, government agencies, foundations and corporations have resulted in one of the most extensive and longest continuous data bases on the hydrology, biology, geology and chemistry of natural ecosystems.