(Who Blessed) The Rains Down at the CAP LTER

An experimental approach takes a ground-level look at the ecological winners and losers of desert soil communities under shifting precipitation regimes in the Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER. 

What is an urban ecosystem?

Find out what makes an urban LTER site with examples from three ecosystems at the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research site. 

LTER Graduate Student Spotlight: Marina Lauck

Marina Lauck of CAP LTER

This spotlight is part of an ongoing series featuring many of our LTER Network graduate student representatives who contribute valuable research and leadership across the network. To learn more about LTER graduate research, visit this page. Marina Lauck is a fourth year PhD candidate at Arizona State University and is the graduate student representative for… Read more »

Wildlife Friendly Cities in the face of Covid-19

Credit: Laura Templeton We’ve all spent the majority of 2020 stuck inside. As we’ve been staring out our windows longing to return to our ‘normal’ lives, where we can meet co-workers in the coffee room or catch up with our favorite podcasts on our commute, we might have noticed some interesting wildlife behavior. Maybe we… Read more »

Thinking about long-term futures to make better decisions today

Credit: CAP-LTER. CC BY-SA 4.0 Anticipating the needs of cities in the future is a key aspect of urban sustainability. One approach to planning for sustainable cities is for researchers and practitioners to work together to develop scenarios that benefit communities as well as ecosystems. Central Arizona Phoenix LTER (CAP LTER) is taking an innovative approach… Read more »

LTER Road Trip: Decomposing Cactus in the Arizona Desert

decomposition plot with a piece of cactus.

Flowers bloomed in the mountain desert outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and I leapt out of the car near the Central-Arizona Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) site’s research plots. At first, it was the saguaro cacti that completely arrested my attention. Tall and thick, the giant cacti reached to the sky like hands; the… Read more »