LTER at AGU Fall Meeting, 2021
LTER has a strong presence at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in 2021. See which talks are happening here:
Climate change makes kelp less nutritious
For Southern California reefs and beaches, giant kelp fuels the food web and creates an environment in which biodiversity booms. But the nutritional quality of kelp is lower than it once was, a new study from the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER shows. The culprit? Climate change and warming ocean water, coauthors Dr. Heili Lowman and Kyle Emery find.
Coordination is everything: Species richness synchrony predicts ecosystem stability across ecosystems
The LTER Synchrony Synthesis group links richness synchrony to ecosystem stability in a new study, showing synchrony is a key control on ecosystem functions.
Space & Time: Data that cover both push the boundaries of ecology
A new paper by Dr. Andrew Rypel uses long-term datasets to reveal spatial and temporal variation for fish in Wisconsin lakes.
In “The Conversation”: Climate change is already disrupting US forests and coasts
Scientists have been consistently documenting environmental changes at research sites like this one in the Cascade Mountains for decades. US Forest Service Michael Paul Nelson, Oregon State University and Peter Mark Groffman, CUNY Graduate Center Record-breaking heat waves and drought have left West Coast rivers lethally hot for salmon, literally cooked millions of mussels… Read more »
Designing a long-term experiment to withstand the rising tides
Spend a day in the field with Virginia Coast Reserve researchers as they investigate ghost forests formed by sea level rise.
Slow Research to Understand Fast Change
By harnessing decades of rich data, scientists are beginning to forecast future conditions and plan ways to manage, mitigate, or adapt to likely changes in ecosystems that will impact human economies, health and wellbeing.
Choose Your Poison: Plant Disease Outbreaks May Be Curbed by Periodic Wildfire
Wildfires have made headlines worldwide in recent years — and for good reason. Evidence points to increasing wildfire frequency and intensity across many vulnerable ecosystems as climate change impacts grow ever more evident. However, periodic wildfires in ecosystems adapted to them can actually help inhibit plant disease outbreaks, according to new research from Cedar Creek… Read more »
LTER Metacommunity Synthesis Working Group provides roadmap for synthesizing long-term and large-scale data
Earth is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis that is expected to worsen into the future. Scientists are scrambling to study how species interactions are responding to climate and ecosystem change, but often lack long-term, large-scale datasets that help determine which processes are most relevant in a given ecosystem. In a new paper, members… Read more »
2020 LTER Research Roundup
Now that 2021 is here, most of us are ready to put last year behind us for good. However, 2020 wasn’t all bad from an LTER standpoint. Dozens of impressive research articles from across the network were published in top journals. We featured many of these in our monthly newsletters, but we couldn’t get to… Read more »