Hunting for Biocrusts: The living skin of the earth
Although biocrusts are small and thin, there is so much to learn about these powerful microbial communities and the roles they play in desert ecosystems.
Site Exchange Fellows Announced
The LTER Network Office is pleased to announce that we will be able to fund four site exchange fellowships in 2025. Site exchanges were designed to facilitate between-site comparisons and support the development of cross-site projects. The 2025 awardees exemplify a variety of approaches to such collaboration, including: shared sampling efforts, development and dissemination of… Read more »
Ten years later: an LTER synthesis working group leads to discovery and accelerates four careers
The CoRRE Working Group continues to develop new ways to study plant community change across the globe.
Anxious, Elitist, and Eccentric: Species of the Chihuahuan Desert
today, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to some of the remarkable flora and fauna who call the Chihuahuan desert home—I hope you’ll meet their smug, elitist, shy, anxious selves in person one day.
Grass cover in the Southwest was determined by a Pacific Ocean cycle—until humans disrupted the link.
A 104 year old dataset reveals that a Pacific Ocean cycle determines grass cover at New Mexico’s Jornada Basin LTER—and then shows that link is now broken.
Across fourteen LTERs, soil carbon is a “gatekeeper” on the nitrogen cycle
An LTER cross site synthesis effort reveals that soil carbon availability determines nitrogen mineralization and nitrification rates across a wide diversity of terrestrial ecosystems.
NEON and LTER: A Long-Term Partnership for Ecological Observation
The shared spaces between LTER and NEON add value for both networks and for the research community at large.
Coordination is everything: Species richness synchrony predicts ecosystem stability across ecosystems
The LTER Synchrony Synthesis group links richness synchrony to ecosystem stability in a new study, showing synchrony is a key control on ecosystem functions.
LTER Sites Central to Several New NSF Critical Zone Cluster Awards
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced ten new awards for its Critical Zone Collaborative Network (CZCN), and LTER sites will play a prominent role in four of them. The awards fund a wide range of investigations to better understand the ‘critical zone’, the area of our planet where water, air, soil, rock and living… Read more »
Got Shrubs? Woody plants are changing ecological communities around the globe
The Knights Who Say “Ni” would be delighted by a growing trend across many of the planet’s major biomes—tree and grass species are being taken over by shrubbery. Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn’t so favorable for native vegetation that struggles to compete with an invading shrub army (the term ecologists often use is ‘woody plant encroachment’)…. Read more »
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Help shape the ILTER Open Science Conference!
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Returning Home to California’s Kelp Forests
McMurdo and Konza featured in PBS Series
Natural Areas Conference Call for Proposals
Request for Synthesis Proposals 2026
Hunting for Biocrusts: The living skin of the earth
Our second summer, we were not evacuated!