LTER Science Update provides short, accessible articles describing recent news and publications from across the Network. We hope you will be informed and inspired. Subscribers can sign up online and manage their own subscription settings, so feel free to share with interested colleagues. Have a recent paper or project that may be of interest? Please send us a few basic details using our news submission form and we’ll follow up.
LNO and other organizational updates will continue to appear in Network News on a quarterly basis or as needed.
A 16-year time series of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus at Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory at the Northeast U.S. Shelf LTER illustrates a regular seasonal pattern of Syn as well as daily dynamics.
Using models to flesh out alternative futures for the Everglades under different rainfall scenarios, researchers provide much-needed detail for water and environment managers.
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.
Background and plans Many global change drivers (GCDs) lead to chronic alterations in resource availability. As communities change through time in response to these GCDs, the magnitude and direction of ecosystem responses are also predicted to change in a non-linear fashion. We proposed to examine whether plant community dynamics are predictive of shifts in ecosystem… Read more »
The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is predicted to be a near record size in 2019. By the end of summer, the hypoxic region at the mouth of the Mississippi River is expected to occupy over 22,000 square kilometers—an area the size of Massachusetts. The culprit? Nitrogen-based fertilizers applied to crops across the Midwest that… Read more »
Inspired by several citizen science projects, a team from Bonanza Creek LTER studied how changes to season lengths in Interior Alaska affected native and non-native species.
Researchers at Mo’orea LTER did not observe evidence that corals acclimatize to ocean acidification, but they did observe that some are more sensitive to it than others.
