In coastal peatlands, factors related to global climate change are expected to alter the flux of CO2 from soils to the atmosphere. Plant-soil feedbacks are expected to yield increased ecosystem stability, and strong feedback is often expressed in coastal systems, especially in peatlands. However, peatland characteristics that influence these feedbacks are not well studied, and could elucidate a better understanding of C dynamics.

It is currently clear that both soil nutrient availability and consumers influence plant communities and that these factors may interact in interesting ways. However, the relative strengths of these factors and their interactions in terrestrial systems are still unclear. My goal is to generalize the relative impacts of nutrient availability and consumer control and their interactive effects on grassland communities across the precipitation gradient of the Great Plains, from shortgrass steppe through tallgrass prairie.

Patterns of phenology for plants and animals control ecosystem processes, determine land surface properties, control biosphere-atmosphere interactions, and affect food production, health, conservation, and recreation. Although phenological data and models have applications related to scientific research, education and outreach, agriculture, tourism and recreation, human health, and natural resource conservation and management, until recently there was no coordinated effort to understand phenology at the national scale.

More than 70% of emerging diseases are vector-borne or zoonotic in origin. The One Health Initiative recognizes the link between ecosystems, humans, domestic animals and wildlife in an effort to integrate human and veterinary medicine with ecology. This abstract is a call for collaborators across the LTER network to assist in developing a One Health Initiative that aims to identify ecological drivers of cross-species disease transmission in a changing environment.

Increasing land fragmentation, mostly caused by urban sprawl and “leap-frog’ developments, is a major concern in many rapidly growing metropolitan cities of the US. Land fragmentation affects biodiversity and ecosystem processes, as portions of the landscape become isolated without connecting corridors and this, in turn, can change ecological structure and function. This cross-site comparative study, a joint-collaboration of several LTER sites (i.e.

Large and complex watersheds, as result of complex topography, characterize the Mexican landscape. And although water for human consumption is becoming more limited as water demands increase, there is incomplete information on current and future water availability. As water resources become scarce, it is not clear how ecosystem services of economic critical ecosystems will be impacted due to limited water supply in Mexico. The objective of this project is to evaluate how ecosystem resiliency capacity is controlled by the hydrological connectivity in a variety of Mexican ecosystems.

The acceleration in the release of carbon from soils is one of the most important positive feedbacks related to anthropogenically induced climate change. Analyses studying the mechanisms for soil carbon release through decomposition have focused on the effect of changes in the average temperature, with little attention to changes to its variability.

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is ubiquitous in a wide range in aquatic environments and plays important ecological roles by fueling the microbial loop, acting as a factor determining light penetration, as the substrate for photoproducts, as a pH buffer, and as a medium for the complexation of trace metals. In addition, DOM fluxes from terrestrial to marine environments have been reported to steadily increase due to climate change and anthropogenic influences. Thus, the chemical characteristics of DOM have extensive implications in aquatic environments.

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) entered in 2004 in a five year cooperative agreement with LTER. The NBII-LTER cooperative agreement is the result of efforts championed by W. Michener dating back to 2000. The overarching goal is the interoperability of both networks: Sharing the wealth on information on ecological and biological resources, and offer those to educators,, scientists, lawmakers and the public in general.

DataONE (Observation Network Earth) ensures the preservation and access to earth observation data spanning broad science disciplines to enable advances in science and education. For example, data on the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases can facilitate advances in climate change science and modeling, while data on land use patterns can facilitate scientific understanding of human-environment interactions at local and regional scales.