In the United States, society spends billions of dollars each year on stream restoration. Knowing where restoration efforts are likely to be most effective could help get more restoration-bang for those bucks. A recent study of 13 river restoration projects by investigators from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER found that restoration appeared to be more effective at… Read more »
Credit: Rutebega. CC BY-SA 3.0.In the digital age, while public access to information about parks and public land conservation is readily available, records on private-land conservation remain incomplete and inconsistent. To reveal the reasons behind the gaps in data on private-land conservation, LTER-funded researchers analyzed maps and documents, and conducted interviews focused on four major… Read more »
Credit: Jim, the photographer. CC Y 2.0To reduce the risk of being eaten, prey animals may change their behavior (by staying hidden during certain hours, for example) and adapt physiologically. Although these responses help prey survive in the short-term, they also suppress their ability to move and reproduce. By studying insect responses to the risk… Read more »
How can researchers project the ways in which land-use changes will affect ecosystem services when they don’t yet know what course development will take? Integrated scenario analysis models several possible trajectories to examine the interactive effects that land-use change could have on ecosystem structure and function.
What information is needed to predict where fires will start in desert grasslands and how big they will get? Soil type turns out to play a larger role than expected.
There are certain events, such as severe storms or a crash in financial markets, that catalyze transitions in social-ecological systems, in a process that is akin to the way a hurricane or insect outbreak might catalyze an ecological transition. To understand the patterns that emerge in social-ecological systems, ecologists must understand governance, a process rooted in the key social science concepts of power and networks.
How-and when-do ecosystems change character? Are those shifts reversible? And what signs might precede them? Such questions are hard enough to answer in a single place. One might think that incorporating different kinds of ecosystems would only complicate the problem. But a group of scientists in the Long-Term Ecological Research Network is finding a remarkably consistent pattern by combining models and data across several long-term ecological experiments.
Novel ecosystems can emerge through many kinds of changes, including changes in mean climate, species invasions, and increased or decreased variability. Researchers at Jordana Basin LTER have highlighted the role of interannual climate variability in changing the outcome when an exotic grass species invades dry shrubland. Using a process-based model, they predicted three outcomes, depending on the degree of variability and timing relative to invasion.
Climate-change is predicted to have a larger impact on Arctic regions than on temperate ecosystems. As a result, rural communities relying on local wild resources, or subsistence harvesting, are vulnerable to climate-change-induced environmental trends affecting the availability of fish, waterfowl, and other key resources.
How do you begin to approach wicked problems, those that span socioeconomic and ecological spheres, when solutions involve multiple and varied stakeholders? Researchers at the Kellog Biological Station LTER began to tackle one of U.S. agriculture’s greatest challenges, excess nitrogen pollution, by hosting “The N Roundtable,” to improve the flow of information through a farming landscape that has changed dramatically in the past few decades.
