Loner Lizards Stress in Shared Shade
Human introverts aren’t the only ones who get stressed in shared social environments. Lizards like patchy and spread out shaded spaces where they can avoid interactions with other lizards.
LTER Road Trip: How Soil Crusts Impact the Landscape
Blue grama grass, golden stems meeting dead undergrowth beneath, completely surrounded Dr. Jen Rudgers in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). The meadow stretched as far as the eye could see, eventually meeting a dense slope of creosote shrubland, surrounded by bronze mountains in central New Mexico. The cool of early morning had already given… Read more »
Southwest Regional Student Meetup – Grasslands, Deserts, and Cities
Students from the Central Arizona-Phoenix, Sevilleta, and Jornada LTER visit and present posters at the CAP LTER All Scientists Meeting.
LTER Road Trip: The MegaMe Monsoon Experiment
Across the world, shrubs are encroaching on landscapes. In Virginia, they take over coastal islands; in Colorado, they move across mountain tundra. In New Mexico, creosote outcompetes native grasses, drastically changing the drylands ecology in the Sevilleta LTER and Wildlife Refuge. Surrounded by remaining grasslands and the mountains in the distance, I stood beneath one… Read more »
LTER Road Trip: Looking into the New Mexico Future
At night, 10 m x 10 m sliding screens come alive in New Mexico’s Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). Across the refuge’s grass and shrubland regions, the screens roll across metal rectangles, trapping heat from the day and raising the temperature of the ground. Back at computers in Albuquerque, Sevilleta LTER researchers monitor their equipment,… Read more »
Art Student Sarah Rose at Sevilleta Field Station (SEV)
All science and art students spend a summer at the University of New Mexico Sevilleta Field Station, where they participate in journal club, seminars, and other summer REU activities. Art REU students are encouraged to participate in field work and data collection with REU students in the sciences. Final projects are presented during an on-site… Read more »
Art Student Siena McKim at Sevilleta Field Station (SEV)
All science and art students spend a summer at the University of New Mexico Sevilleta Field Station, where they participate in journal club, seminars, and other summer REU activities. Art REU students are encouraged to participate in field work and data collection with REU students in the sciences. Final projects are presented during an on-site… Read more »
Climate Variability: An installation at the Sevilleta LTER (SEV)
Climate Variability Installation uses art to express fundamental questions about climate change in dryland ecosystems. The RAC supported project engages students across disciplines, the general public, and staff at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge and UNM Sevilleta Field Station. The outdoor installation represents the site’s groundbreaking research to understand climate change in a context of… Read more »
A Changing Climate Drives Change in Ecological Modeling
Relying on a 114 year-long data set, researchers from the Sevilleta LTER have developed a more accurate way to model climate sensitivity functions that describe the relationship between ecological variability and plant productivity, rather than focusing on linear relationships between ecosystem response and average climate trends, as is more typical. While variances in factors such as… Read more »
A bigger role for light in dryland decomposition
Credit: CC BY-NC 2.0 Alison Hurt https://flic.kr/p/5ZuUYIt’s kind of amazing what you can learn by taking a fresh look at old data. A re-analysis of data from a large and influential decomposition experiment suggests that—at least in arid lands—the degradation of organic matter by light plays a much bigger role than previously understood. Back in… Read more »
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