It stands to reason that variable environmental conditions would support greater plant diversity, but few experiments have offered concrete support for the “environmental heterogeneity hypothesis.” In re-establishing tallgrass prairie, the correlation took over 15 years to emerge.
Plans We set out to answer the general question: How do metacommunity dynamics mediate community responses to disturbance across the ecosystems represented in the LTER network? Metacommunity theory provides a framework to predict when different types of community assembly processes should control the composition of the species pool both at local and regional scales. Thus,… Read more »
LTER presents two plenary talks, plus results from synthesis working groups.
Individual talks and posters are listed and cover topics as diverse as the ecology of segregation, connectivity in barrier island communities, and modeling complex landscapes using machine learning.
Farmers have known for centuries that fertilizer and irrigation help boost crop growth. But how does long-term application of fertilizer and water affect the composition of surrounding plant communities? In a study based at the Cedar Creek LTER, early signs suggest that added water and nutrients support the survival of new species and encourage more… Read more »
Fires and floods are becoming all too common for coastal Southern California residents — but are these ‘extreme’ events likely to become even more frequent? Answering this question requires a comprehensive understanding of precipitation patterns in the region and how they are likely to change in the coming decades. Most previous research on climate change… Read more »
Will you be attending the 2019 Ecological Society of America Meeting? Want your colleagues to know when and where you are presenting? Please fill out the form below and the LTER Network Communications Office will compile and share a list of all the LTER presentations at the meeting. 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2012 summaries are… Read more »
LTER Network presentations and posters at American Geophysical Union (AGU) Meeting 2018
Researchers Frederik Schulz (US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute) and Lauren Alteio (University of Massachusetts) have discovered sixteen new giant viruses in soil samples from a long-term research site at the Harvard Forest LTER, described in a Nature Communications paper published in November 2018. Giant viruses are larger than most single celled organisms, and tend… Read more »
The following posters will be presented at the 2018 LTER All Scientists’ Meeting and are organized here alphabetically by last name. Session A posters (A-F001 to A-K128) will be presented on Monday evening, October 1st and Session B posters (B-F001 to B-K130) will be presented on Tuesday evening, October 2nd. Posters labeled with F are… Read more »
2018 ESA Annual Meeting Presentations In the past year alone, extreme events including hurricanes, droughts, and extensive fires have impacted significant regions of the United States—affecting the health of both natural habitats and human communities. Fittingly, the theme of this year’s Ecological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting is ‘Extreme events, resilience and human well-being.’… Read more »
