Published
Principal Investigator(s): Kimberly Komatsu|Meghan L. Avolio|Kevin R. Wilcox

The Communities-to-Ecosystem Working Group will utilize data from 101 long-term resource manipulation experiments, like this one at Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER studying impacts of nutrient enrichment in urban desert parks.
Credit: © Tim Trumble.
Project Summary: Many global change drivers (GCDs) lead to chronic alterations in resource availability. As communities change through time in response to these GCDs, the magnitude and direction of ecosystem responses is also predicted to change in a non-linear fashion. We propose to examine whether plant community dynamics are predictive of shifts in ecosystem function across 101 long-term resource manipulation experiments (including 32 LTER experiments). Our working group will address three main objectives: 1) identify temporal patterns of plant community change in response to global change manipulations; 2) link these patterns of community change to changes in aboveground net primary productivity and carbon storage; and 3) incorporate community change into ecosystem models predicting functional responses to GCDs. These objectives address four of the five LTER core thematic areas (primary production, population studies, organic matter dynamics, and disturbance patterns/processes). Overall, we will test current ecological theory to inform predictions of future responses to GCDs across a wide variety of terrestrial herbaceous systems, including those represented by 17 LTER sites. Funding from the LTER NCO will allow a diverse group of ecologists with expertise in modeling, statistical development, community ecology, and field experiments to come together to accomplish these objectives.
Credit: © Tim Trumble.
Start Date: May 23, 2016
Proposed End Date: December 31, 2019
Meeting Dates:
- November 28, 2016 - December 2, 2016: , NCEAS
- October 23, 2017 - October 27, 2017: , Fort Collins, CO
- March 18, 2018 - March 24, 2018: , Annapolis, MD
- October 15, 2018 - October 18, 2018: , NCEAS
- May 14, 2019 - May 16, 2019: , Annapolis, MD
- July 15, 2019 - July 18, 2019: , NCEAS
Synthesis Products:
- Determinants of community compositional change are equally affected by global change, Ecology Letters, 2021
- Temporal variability in production is not consistently affected by global change drivers across herbaceous-dominated ecosystems, Oecologia, 2020
- Global change effects on plant communities are magnified by time and the number of global change factors imposed, PNAS, 2019
- A comprehensive approach to analyzing community dynamics using rank abundance curves, Ecosphere, 2019
- Codyn R Package: Community Dynamics Metrics, Comprehensive R Archive Network, 2019
- Ambient changes exceed treatment effects on plant species abundance in global change experiments, Global Change Biology, 2018
- Project Webinar (60 min), YouTube, 2018
- Video Update (6 min), YouTube, 2018
- Asynchrony among local communities stabilises ecosystem function of metacommunities, Ecology Letters, 2017
- A framework for quantifying the magnitude and variability of community responses to global change drivers, Ecosphere, 2015
Sites Represented:
- ARC|CDR|HFR|JRN|KBS|KNZ|NWT|PIE|SEV|SGS