Grant history of an LTER site
The Bonanza Creek LTER (BNZ) focuses on improving our understanding of the long-term consequences of changing climate and disturbance regimes in the Alaskan boreal forest by examining the underlying mechanisms that drive ecosystem resilience and vulnerability toward change. The overall objective is to document the major controls over forest dynamics, biogeochemistry and disturbance and their… Read more »
The cornerstone of the Bonanza Creek (BNZ) LTER research has been the state factor approach, which allows prediction of ecosystem properties based on independent controls such as climate, parent material, topography, potential biota, and time and interactive controls, i.e., processes internal to ecosystems that both affect and respond to ecosystem processes. The intellectual merit of… Read more »
The Bonanza Creek (BNZ) LTER project was initiated in 1987 and since then has provided experimental and observational research designed to understand the dynamics, resilience, and vulnerability of Alaska’s boreal forest ecosystems. The project has illuminated the responses of boreal forest organisms and ecosystems to climate and various atmospheric inputs, focusing on forest and landscape… Read more »
Alaska has warmed more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the United States over the past century, with some of the largest increases occurring in boreal (pine) forests far from the coast. This warming has triggered large changes in the number and size of wildfires, the melting of frozen soil, patterns of water… Read more »
Over the past century, Alaska has been warming twice as quickly as the global average, with large increases occurring in its interior boreal forests. This warmer, drier climate has triggered important changes to regional wildfire, pests and pathogen outbreaks, and permafrost thaw. The Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (BNZ LTER) program will advance understanding of… Read more »
Grimm 9714833 This project is a long-term study of the Phoenix metropolitan area and fringing regions of central Arizona into which Phoenix is rapidly expanding. Objectives of this LTER program are to: 1) generate and test general ecological theory in an urban environment, 2) enhance understanding of the ecology of cities, 3) identify feedbacks between… Read more »
CAP-2 proposes to extend long-term study of central Arizona and metropolitan Phoenix, a desert region supporting agricultural and urban/suburban land uses while undergoing rapid urbanization and population growth. CAP studies human drivers and feedbacks of ecological change. Previous work concentrated on the central themes of urbanization patterns and processes altering the city’s ecological conditions and… Read more »
For more than three decades, the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program has supported fundamental ecological research that requires long time periods and large spatial scales at a coordinated network of more than two dozen field sites. Since 1998, the LTER Program has supported two sites in urban settings to explicitly examine the interactions among human… Read more »
Humans are becoming an increasingly urban species, pointing to the profound importance of understanding how urban ecosystems function. Cities are concentrated consumers of energy and resources and producers of various wastes, but they are also centers of social networks, innovation, efficiency, and solutions. The Central Arizona Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research Program (CAP LTER) includes scientists… Read more »
Humans are rapidly becoming an urban species. It is profoundly important, therefore, to understand urban ecosystems. Cities are consumers of energy and resources and producers of waste. They are also social networks that create innovation, efficiency, and solutions. The Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER Program (CAP) empowers researchers from the environmental and social sciences to study cities… Read more »
