In 2014, massive wildfires swept through the Northwest Territories of Canada, burning over two million hectares of boreal forest, as well as the highly organic soils on which they stood. Researchers with the Bonanza Creek LTER used this unplanned experiment to learn whether the carbon released from burned land had been recently deposited or if… Read more »
Credit: Jack Pearce via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)Species that are abundant often go ignored by conservation planning until an acute threat to their populations emerge – and by then, sometimes it’s too late. According to a new article in the journal Ecosphere, common species are often critically important as structural, dominant, or foundation species in… Read more »
It stands to reason that variable environmental conditions would support greater plant diversity, but few experiments have offered concrete support for the “environmental heterogeneity hypothesis.” In re-establishing tallgrass prairie, the correlation took over 15 years to emerge.
From the AIBS Public Policy Report: Credit: M. Downs/LTER-NCO. CC BY-SA 4.0.Reports abound from professional societies, the Academies, government agencies, and researchers calling attention to the fact that science is increasingly an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and international endeavor. In short, science has become a “team sport.” There is a real and present need to better… Read more »
by Ian Yesilonis (Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER) Walking through the woods and observing the trees and animals is something I have always loved to do growing up in Baltimore. Our temperate deciduous forests in the city are typically smaller patches; however, one park, the Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park (1,216 acres), is quite large and also has big… Read more »
LTER Network News is a forum for sharing news and activities from across the LTER Network. This is our water cooler. Please share personnel changes, new grants, cross-Network activities that might interest your LTER colleagues.
Laura Lilly takes us along on a sampling cruise with the California Current Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research site!
The LTER Network Office at UCSB is fielding a new call for synthesis proposals with a deadline of October 23, 2019, so we are taking liberties with the format of this newsletter to bring readers a few thoughts on the variety of research that constitutes synthesis, the reasons we find it valuable, and a sampling… Read more »
Plans We set out to answer the general question: How do metacommunity dynamics mediate community responses to disturbance across the ecosystems represented in the LTER network? Metacommunity theory provides a framework to predict when different types of community assembly processes should control the composition of the species pool both at local and regional scales. Thus,… Read more »
