today, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to some of the remarkable flora and fauna who call the Chihuahuan desert home—I hope you’ll meet their smug, elitist, shy, anxious selves in person one day.
A 104 year old dataset reveals that a Pacific Ocean cycle determines grass cover at New Mexico’s Jornada Basin LTER—and then shows that link is now broken.
An LTER cross site synthesis effort reveals that soil carbon availability determines nitrogen mineralization and nitrification rates across a wide diversity of terrestrial ecosystems.
The shared spaces between LTER and NEON add value for both networks and for the research community at large.
The LTER Synchrony Synthesis group links richness synchrony to ecosystem stability in a new study, showing synchrony is a key control on ecosystem functions.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced ten new awards for its Critical Zone Collaborative Network (CZCN), and LTER sites will play a prominent role in four of them. The awards fund a wide range of investigations to better understand the ‘critical zone’, the area of our planet where water, air, soil, rock and living… Read more »
The Knights Who Say “Ni” would be delighted by a growing trend across many of the planet’s major biomes—tree and grass species are being taken over by shrubbery. Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn’t so favorable for native vegetation that struggles to compete with an invading shrub army (the term ecologists often use is ‘woody plant encroachment’)…. Read more »
Students from the Central Arizona-Phoenix, Sevilleta, and Jornada LTER visit and present posters at the CAP LTER All Scientists Meeting.
In the center of the grassland and shrubland of the Jornada LTER, I gaze across short mesh nets, arranged in an X and stretching approximately one foot across in each direction, sitting unobtrusively on the ground between mesquite, bushes, and snakeweed bunches. Spherical cottontail rabbit pellets congregated in the low places, and John Anderson, Research… Read more »
What plant communities can tell us about rodents Dr. Debra Peters has spent over 20 years studying changes across 15 study sites in the Jornada Basin, which take an immense amount of effort to monitor three times a year. Field technicians fan out across the landscape, measuring the volume of plant line and estimating new… Read more »
