Long Term Ecological Research
September 30, 2006 11:54 PM   Subscribe

The Long Term Ecological Research Network is a collaborative effort involving more than 1800 scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales. Check out their photo gallery. [more inside]
posted by owhydididoit (6 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 


Ecology post! Nice one. This is a great project, despite its North American focus, and may contribute to teasing apart the functions and processes which continue to drive ecological debate; productivity, diversity, resource heterogeneity. There has already been some great research to come out of this project. The Jordana Basin site builds on extensive prior work investigating the dynamics of arid systems.

Pet topic, sorry.
posted by Jimbob at 1:47 AM on October 1, 2006


Very, very cool. Thanks.
posted by fshgrl at 4:45 PM on October 1, 2006


I worked for a summer at Hubbard Brook, one of these long term research sites. The research is pretty typical, but it's cool to have data that goes back further in time. It's also cool because most research depends on year-to-year grants, but I think there's some funding guaranteed to do at least baseline data collection at these places every year.

The thing I think is really cool is that Baltimore has been added as a research site, so now they're beginning to look at how ecological processes work in cities.
posted by salvia at 6:53 PM on October 1, 2006


The Baltimore study is what got me intersted in LTERN. I can't believe I left it out!
posted by owhydididoit at 8:07 PM on October 1, 2006


Phoenix is also an LTER. The comparison between a mid-Atlantic city and a Southwest city is amazing.

I've had the pleasure of field trips to Coweeta, the featured site of the day. The coolest thing there is the litter exclusion experiment where a network of screens was put over a small stream to look at the effects a lack of leaves and sticks falling in.

(I'm excited to see how many other ecologists there are here.)
posted by hydropsyche at 5:42 AM on October 2, 2006


« Older A delightful construction site   |   The Croquet Project - Web 2.0 Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments