Summer 2016 Dear PIs and Site Managers, It was great to see so many of you in Santa Barbara for the LTER Science Council meeting. I hope you enjoyed our lovely city and began to get a sense of where the office is heading. I certainly got a much better feeling for the interests and energy of our wide-ranging… Read more »
— Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Blues Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and Dorothea Lange all documented the devastation of the Dust Bowl in works that remain resonant with Americans nearly a century later. Via song, prose, and photograph, these artists revealed the devastation wind erosion can wreck on a landscape and the people who rely on… Read more »
Following on the Ecological Theory working group at the 2015 All Scientists Meeting, please find attached an updated syllabus for a Fall 2016 distributed graduate seminar. The seminar series will engage scientists from key theoretical fields of ecology to speak about how long term research informs the evolution of that theory. Each week we will… Read more »
Long Term Ecological Research Network Communications Office (NCO) Call for Working Group Proposals In this packet, you will find all the information needed to submit a proposal to the NCO. Overview and Deadlines | Guidelines for Proposals | Synthesis Working Group | Download as pdf Informational Webinar February 12 at 8:30 a.m. PST (11:30 a.m. EST) Missed the webinar? See the webinar… Read more »
Ask any teacher to identify their students’ favorite question. The answer is universal: “Why do I need to learn this?” The Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Program, funded through NSF and LTER, seeks to give teachers the tools to answer this question in ways that excite and engage their students.
Of the approximately 400 Gigatonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere over the past 200 years, only half has remained in the atmosphere. The other half has been absorbed by the earth’s natural carbon sinks— global oceans, soils, and plants— slowing the amount of climate change we might otherwise observe. While the earth currently acts as… Read more »
The United Nations estimates that 33% of global soils are moderately to severely degraded, and that given average rates of erosion, topsoil could be gone in 60 years. In response, the UN General Assembly declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. Their goal: to take a decidedly prosaic topic — soil health — and make… Read more »
Global population continues to grow: the United Nations expects an additional 2.5 billion people by 2050, all of whom will be absorbed into urban areas. When demographers add rural to urban migrants to that number, they project an additional 3.1 billion city dwellers by mid-century. As the concentration of humans in cities surges, a better… Read more »
What will the future feel like in our forests? In six plots at the Hubbard Brook Long Term Ecological Research Site in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the trees already know. Dr. Pamela Templer has created a robust simulation of the climate—warmer summer temperatures and later snowfall—that these forests will experience within the century…. Read more »
The IPCC projects that, even if humans succeed in keeping temperatures below the 2°C target set in Paris, sea level will rise 0.28 to 0.61 m this century. With this amount of sea level rise, salt water pulses from high tide floods and storm surges will become ever-more common in coastal ecosystems. Multiple LTER sites are running experiments… Read more »
