The LTER Network Office is excited to announce that three Scientific Peers Advancing Research Collaborations (SPARC) proposals were funded this year. The three groups will meet in person at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for one week, starting in the fall.
The projects demonstrate how there are many ways towards creating a successful synthesis project. One, the Above-belowground synchrony and coupling group, is an extension of our SSECR course designed to teach early career researchers the skills needed to succeed in synthesis. Another, the Material legacy effects group, springboards off a previously funded LTER Synthesis Proposal, expanding that work in a new direction with the help and leadership of new people. The final project, Material legacy effects, expands a question first comprehensively explored at the Moorea Coral Reef LTER site to a much broader spectrum of sites. Together, these projects demonstrate the many ways that the LTER Network Office catalyzes impactful, cross-cutting synthesis research across the project lifecycle.
Integrating above-and belowground community data to understand ecosystem temporal dynamics and responses to global change (Above-belowground synchrony and coupling)
Plants and soil microbes are deeply interconnected. Some microbes fix nitrogen that plants use while sheltered in the protective hollows within roots, for example, and their relationship influences nutrient cycling, plant productivity, community dynamics and more. “There’s really intricate connections between above ground plant and below ground microbial communities, and these kinds of interactions between these communities are really key to ecosystem function, stability, and resilience,” says Ashley Bulseco, an assistant professor of coastal microbial and ecosystem ecology at the University of New Hampshire.
Yet few datasets contain information about both the above and belowground communities simultaneously—making research that connects the two difficult. “It’s rare to find data sets that have those two data collected at the same time and the same place, and especially over a significant amount of time,” says Bulseco.
Bulseco is one of the researchers leading a new LTER SPARC working group to demonstrate the value of synchronized above and belowground community data. The project is a continuation of her group’s Synthesis Skills for Early Career Researchers final project, and her co-leads include her former SSECR team members Smriti Pehim Limbu (postdoc, Dartmouth College, KNZ), Abigail Borgmeier (graduate student, BYU, MCM & SEV), McKinley Nevins (graduate student, WSU, AND), and Francis Chaves Rodriguez (postdoc, CSU, KNZ). ”I think [the SPARC funding] goes on to show how much we have grown as a team together,” says Pehim Limbu. Chaves Rodriguez agrees. “SPARC showed us that we can take [this concept] further and be more ambitious in our goals” as a group, she says.
As SSECR fellows interested in the link between above and belowground communities, the group found that many sites did, in fact, have compatible above and belowground data. But often, those data were published in different places or at different times, with no clear link between the two datasets—even though they’re measuring two parts of the same system. “I’ll emphasize that the data does exist,” says Borgmeier. “It’s just challenging to find in a paired format.”
The first step of this working group is to compile paired above and belowground data from terrestrial systems across the LTER Network and NEON. Their broader team includes system experts from most represented ecosystems with a deep understanding of data collection at each site. “There is diversity and expertise,” Pehim Limbu says about their team. “Some are really good with data, some with aboveground communities, others are good with belowground communities.”
But compiling that data is just the first step in what the team sees as a broader objective: demonstrating the value of linking above and belowground research. “We’re shifting gears towards making the argument for why people should be putting their time, resources, and effort toward this sort of paired monitoring,” says Nevins. To do that, the group plans to use their dataset to show what kinds of analyses are possible when both above and belowground data are collected in parallel and published together.
“This is probably like the beginning of a career-long pursuit for some of us,” says Borgmeier. “So it felt like a natural next step to expand beyond SSECR, simply because we’re tackling a really big question and a really big challenge.”
The group has a special session planned at ESA 2025 in Baltimore to gather ideas around the above-belowground concept. Check it out here.
LTER Sites Represented: AND, BNZ, CDR, HFR, KNZ, LUQ, NWT, PIE
Synthesis Group Leads: Ashley Bulseco (PIE LTER), Smriti Pehim Limbu (KNZ LTER), Abigail Borgmeier (MCM & SEV LTER), L. McKinley Nevins (AND), Francis Chaves Rodriguez (KNZ)
Life after death: how legacies of dead foundation species influence ecological processes across marine and terrestrial ecosystems (Material legacy effects)
When a coral dies, it leaves behind a skeleton; a dead tree turns into a decaying stump; an oyster reef becomes a pile of shells. After death, the remnants of these organisms still play an important role for their species. Coral skeletons harbor algae that prevent new coral from growing. Standing dead trees crowd out the canopy for younger trees but dead oyster reefs provide a substrate for new oyster larvae to cling to.
“Material legacies” from dead species such as these have outsized effects on their living counterparts in certain ecosystems, and their effects are well documented. But where some dead species benefit the living, others do the opposite.
A new LTER SPARC working group is trying to generalize the effects of material legacies across a wide range of ecosystems. They aim to characterize different types of material legacies and their effects on their living counterparts. “The core of the idea was something I looked at in coral reefs when I was working as a PhD student [at the Moorea Coral Reef LTER site],” says Kai Kopecky, one of the working group leads. “I spent my whole PhD looking at how the dead remains of corals impact the recovery of coral populations and the resilience of that ecosystem. I thought I would try to carry that question a little bit further and see if we could generalize these responses into other ecosystems.”
Kopecky proposed the working group alongside Niwot Ridge LTER PI Katie Suding and Ty Tuff, Data Scientist at ESIIL, NSF’s Biology and Computer Science Synthesis Center. They have already identified eleven different material legacies at LTER sites spanning from Alaska to French Polynesia. But data is just the first step. “The benefit of pulling together this working group is that real deep system specific knowledge and expertise from someone at each different LTER site,” says Kai, noting that the rest of their group includes experts from each site that contributed data. With a room full of experts, the group can start to probe their data for general responses across all these systems.
Their ultimate goal, says Kopecky, is to try and develop a predictive framework for these kinds of legacies that spans ecosystems. “How can we actually use our results to make some accurate and reliable predictions about how these legacies are going to influence ecosystems into the future?,” he says, adding that climate change threatens to alter the character of many of these legacies. Those changes have consequences for foundation species, and their results might be able to help land managers help those species continue to thrive in a different climate.
“Is the built environment a resource or a limitation?,” asks Tuff. “I think the answer is going to be all over the place. But those answers open up this whole new field of discovery.”
LTER Sites Represented: KNZ, MCR, LUQ, GCE, BNZ, VCR, SBC, HFR, NWT, FCE, AND
Synthesis Group Leads: Kai Kopecky (MCR, ESIIL), Katharine Suding (NWT, CU Boulder), Ty Tuff (ESIIL)
Temporal variation in taxonomic and functional diversity and nutrient cycling of consumers across aquatic ecosystems and LTER sites (Consumer Functional Diversity)
A school of anchovies and a solitary tuna may both be fish, but their roles in an ecosystem differ dramatically: one filters plankton in vast numbers, the other hunts with speed and precision at the top of the food web. These differences aren’t captured by taxonomy alone—but by species body size, feeding mode, metabolic rate, and more. This nuance underpins functional traits, which have become a powerful tool in ecology: by focusing on traits rather than taxonomy, ecologists can better understand how an ecosystem functions.
“We’re hoping to better understand the ecological strategies that different consumers have” in ecosystems across the LTER, says Shalanda Grier. A postdoc at UCSB and the Moorea Coral Reef LTER Grier is one of the leads of a new LTER SPARC working group designed to use a trait based approach to understand how consumer communities drive ecosystem function. “One main innovation of our project,” explains Camille Magneville, a postdoc at Aarhus University and Grier’s coauthor, “is that it will study consumers across ecosystems. This is a big challenge because you have to find a common set of traits” that apply across systems, she adds.
The project starts with a search for several universal functional traits for consumers. With those universal traits, she adds, the group can then start to understand patterns and trends across ecosystems, over time, and in response to things such as disturbance.
The focus on consumers is a carryover from the 2023 Consumer Nutrient Dynamics working group, run by Grier’s coauthor Mack White, a graduate student at the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER. That group compiled a huge dataset of consumers focused on their role in nutrient cycling. “Having that data is very rare,” says Grier. “[This new group] seemed like a great opportunity to utilize the hard work from [the previous] working group” by using that dataset as a springboard to study functional traits of those consumers.
First, the group aims to compile a universal functional trait database for a wide range of consumers across LTER sites. With that in hand, the group can compare consumers’ roles across systems and try to identify common ecological strategies in these systems. Then, they can see what environmental factors alter those consumer roles. “Maybe a change in temperature has either a positive or negative effect on traits depending on location or the land use history of an ecosystem,” adds White, noting that these kinds of analyses are only possible because of the high resolution climate data at each LTER site. “That allows us to tell a really complete story,” says Lauren Enright, a PhD candidate with the Moorea Coral Reef LTER who also participated in the first working group.
Their hope is that the new dataset proves useful far beyond this working group. “We’ll be doing a lot of the legwork of creating another massive data set in a usable format for other scientists who might have similar questions,” says Enright. With support from the LTER Network Office’s Data Analysts and a long history of synthesis groups creating similar datasets with huge impact, the group is well positioned to succeed in that goal.
LTER Sites Represented: PIE, VCR, FCE, CCE, NES, NGA, SBC, MCR
Synthesis Group Leads: Shalanda Grier (MCR), Lauren Enright (MCR), Camille Magneville, Mackenzie White (FCE)
