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 »
What will the future feel like in our forests? In six plots at the Hubbard Brook Long Term Ecological Research Site in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the trees already know. Dr. Pamela Templer has created a robust simulation of the climate—warmer summer temperatures and later snowfall—that these forests will experience within the century…. Read more »
The IPCC projects that, even if humans succeed in keeping temperatures below the 2°C target set in Paris, sea level will rise 0.28 to 0.61 m this century. With this amount of sea level rise, salt water pulses from high tide floods and storm surges will become ever-more common in coastal ecosystems. Multiple LTER sites are running experiments… Read more »
From August 7 to August 12, the Ecological Society of America will hold its annual meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This year’s theme, “Novel Ecosystems in the Anthropocene,” will build on discussions initiated during last year’s centennial meeting, “Ecological Science at the Frontier.” Human influence now represents the dominant influence on ecosystems worldwide– and a… Read more »
One strength of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network is that it reveals patterns and connections that are only apparent over years and decades. As a national network, it also offers extraordinary opportunities to make comparisons among ecosystems. The Network Communications Office announces the funding of three LTER synthesis proposals, which combine existing data to yield… Read more »
In 2010, when Cyclone Oli hit the reef, Han wondered which way the scale would tip: could the coral recover from both these impacts? Or would macroalgae move in and dominate?
For nearly half a century, ecologists have struggled to explain the relationship between ecosystem productivity and species richness. In a recent paper in Nature, USGS Ecologist James Grace and colleagues have managed to account for the many variables and confirm the long-suspected connection. To do so, they used a causal network model to incorporate data… Read more »
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 »
