Effects of the 2008

In the Phoenix metropolitan area neighborhoods there are three popular types of landscaping, (1) mesic, consisting of lawn and trees, (2) xeric, consisting of desert- and drought-adapted plants, and (3) oasis, landscaping that combines the grassy swaths of mesic and desert plants of xeric. We found that after the socioeconomic stress of the Great Recession, plant species richness of residential yards increased (FIGURE) due to a surge in weedy annual species, which corresponded with a simultaneous increase in homogeneity (RIGHT FIGURE) of residential plant communities. Julie Ripplinger

CCAntiracismActionItems

Planned action items generated at the Cedar Creek LTER site in response to Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests in the Spring of 2020. Cedar Creek LTER Community

planktonsensor_tom_kleindinst

Co-authors Rob Olson and Heidi Sosik have worked on development of the FlowCytobot series of automated submersible plankton sensors at WHOI since the late 1990s Tom Kleindinst

Diver_securing_FCB_Sean_Whelan

Co-author Alexi Shalapyonok secures FlowCytobot (FCB) underwater at the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO) tower. FCB, an automated submersible flow cytometer, operates unattended at MVCO for 6 months or longer, measuring thousands of individual microscopic plankton every hour. Sean Whelan

soilrain_laurenbaur

We characterized the sensitivity of biological soil crusts to drought (drought plot in photo) in dry grassland ecosystems (Fernandes et al. 2018). We also documented plant evolutionary responses to drought (Whitney et al. 2019) Lauren Baur

rainexperiment_jenniferrudgers

We are directly testing how climate mean and variance interacts by building the first field experiments that cross long-term drought with increased rainfall variability. Jennifer Rudgers

LandscapeDiversity

A prairie strip growing in wheat at the KBS LTER Main Cropping Systems Experiment. Kurt Stepnitz