From December 12-16, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) will hold its annual meeting. The LTER Network sites will be well represented with a total of 113 presentations and posters. LTER-related presentations have been organized below by day and time. Please excuse any omissions or misattributions. We will continue to add to and adjust this list up… Read more »
The first Open Science Meeting of the International LTER Network (ILTER) network gathered over 300 participants in Kruger National Park, South Africa to present their latest results, network, and explore next steps for the growing organization. The meeting, which took place from 9-13 October, 2016, offered a balanced mix of scientific talks, poster sessions, workshops,… Read more »
Antarctica Is Practically Defined by Ice. What Happens When It Melts? For prepared observers, a single season of melting offers clues to the future of the southern continent. October 13, 2016—A single season of intense melting buffeted Antarctica in 2001-2002. It yielded changes that ranged from speeding up microbial food webs to shifting penguin populations…. Read more »
A historian travels back a century into the cold, windblown Antarctic, landing at the edge of McMurdo Sound. A group of explorers recently returned to the coast recount their trip into a series of “curious” dry valleys, where the pervasive snow and ice encountered elsewhere on the continent is almost entirely absent. Forced to abandon… Read more »
RFP Deadline: Wednesday, October 5, 2016 (1) This is the second RFP this year. How often will you have a call for proposals? From here forward, we plan to have an annual call for proposals. (2) Currently, we have an NSF grant funded for cross-site research. We would like to get the group together for… Read more »
To promote analysis and synthesis of LTER data, the NCO requests proposals for Synthesis Working Groups, with research to begin before May 2017. Funding is available for 2-4 projects of up to 2 years in duration. The Project Selection Committee is most interested in proposals anticipated to return high impact results in the five core… Read more »
— Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Blues Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and Dorothea Lange all documented the devastation of the Dust Bowl in works that remain resonant with Americans nearly a century later. Via song, prose, and photograph, these artists revealed the devastation wind erosion can wreck on a landscape and the people who rely on… Read more »
Of the approximately 400 Gigatonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere over the past 200 years, only half has remained in the atmosphere. The other half has been absorbed by the earth’s natural carbon sinks— global oceans, soils, and plants— slowing the amount of climate change we might otherwise observe. While the earth currently acts as… Read more »
The United Nations estimates that 33% of global soils are moderately to severely degraded, and that given average rates of erosion, topsoil could be gone in 60 years. In response, the UN General Assembly declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. Their goal: to take a decidedly prosaic topic — soil health — and make… Read more »
Global population continues to grow: the United Nations expects an additional 2.5 billion people by 2050, all of whom will be absorbed into urban areas. When demographers add rural to urban migrants to that number, they project an additional 3.1 billion city dwellers by mid-century. As the concentration of humans in cities surges, a better… Read more »