Soil Type Strongly Influences Likelihood of Fire in Desert Grasslands
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.
Demystifying Governance for Ecologists
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.
What (and when) is the point-of-no-return?
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.
Climate variability predicted to affect outcome of exotic grass invasion
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.
Arctic Communities See Access Challenges Ahead
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.
Collaborative Solutions to Nitrogen Runoff
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.
Putting the “urban” in disturbance: Applying ecological frameworks to cities
The concept of “disturbance” is a core theme of the LTER Network and central to ecological science. How does the idea of disturbance need to change when applied to the interactions of an urban metropolitan region rather than a “natural” system? Ecologists often consider the process of urbanization itself to be a form of disturbance, but that is a habit that has to change, say the authors of a recent paper in Ecosystem Health and Sustainability. People, technology, and infrastructure have to be defined as part of the system when studying cities, they say.
Sustainability in the City
Ecosystem services, such as the water cycle or flood control, support urban sustainability but are also impacted by the development of city-centers. Improving the sustainable design and management of cities, then, requires understanding how development affects such processes and services. A recent study contrasted two methods for measuring urban sustainability, ecology in cities and ecology of cities, and found that the integrative framework of ecology of cities more thoroughly addresses sustainability and its three components: the environment, economy, and society.
Plausible freshwater futures: Yahara watershed, Wisconsin, USA
Talk Description: Scenarios can help communities think about alternative futures, but using them to drive decisions requires data. In Wisconsin’s Yahara Watershed, researchers are combining data and modelling from the Northern Temperate lakes LTER with qualitative scenarios based on trends and events from the global scenarios literature and stakeholder perspectives. The resulting assessments can help… Read more »
Beyond Citizen Science: Local Observations of Climate Change Impacts Guide Vulnerability Research
Unstable ice. Raging rivers. Fire-scorched landscapes. Deep within Alaska’s Yukon River Basin, residents faced with these obstacles during travel or hunting trips now use camera-enabled GPS units to send photographs to researchers across the state. Scientists at the Bonanza Creek LTER and University of Alaska, Fairbanks are using the images, along with the associated GPS… Read more »
Wisconsin Panfish Are Shrinking: Discovery Drives New Fisheries Management Policy
Between 2013 and 2015, Andrew Rypel traveled the state of Wisconsin attending public meetings led by state and local fisheries staff— always with a set of graphs in hand. These graphs showed the steady decline in the size of panfish found in state lakes over the past seventy years. Panfish (unsurprisingly) are fish that fit… Read more »
The making of an ice storm
Ice storms are powerfully disruptive to northeastern forests, but truly understanding their dynamics has proved challenging because they strike with little warning. Hubbard Brook LTER scientists took the matter into their own hands by creating an ice storm of their own making. The experiment, which was covered by NSF360 and Science Now, is allowing them… Read more »
Top Stories
Young Voices of Science: 2026 applications open
Call for proposals: Global ILTER Activity 2026
Call for Proposals: 4th ILTER Open Science Meeting (OSM) 2027
Reminder: Synthesis RFP deadline September 16
LTER at ESA, 2026
Studying post-fire Snowpack at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest
2026 Site Exchanges Announced
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Shirah Strock | Virginia Coast Reserve LTER to Santa Barbara Coastal LTER
Vivian (Lin) Hou | California Current LTER to Northeast Shelf LTER