The KBS LTER site is in a diverse, rural-to-semirural landscape typical of the U.S. Great Lakes and upper Midwest regions. Research at KBS asks how diverse plants, animals, and microbes in agricultural landscapes can contribute to farm productivity, environmental performance, and profitability. We study annual and perennial crops including corn, soybean, and wheat rotations, forage crops such as alfalfa, and biofuel crops such as poplars, switchgrass, and native successional communities.

Tropical environments are changing fast due to deforestation and regrowth, urbanization, climate change, and other forces. The consequences are immense for the whole array of ecosystem services people require. The Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Program (LUQ) is tackling these issues in Puerto Rico. LUQ began in 1988 and focused on natural disturbances (hurricanes, landslides, droughts, floods) and ecosystem response. That work revealed patterns of resistance and resilience to cycles of natural disturbance.

The Konza Prairie LTER Program (KNZ) is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary research program designed to provide a mechanistic and predictive understanding of ecological processes in mesic grasslands, and contribute to synthesis and conceptual advances in ecology. Konza LTER also offers education and training at all levels (K-12 to postgraduate) as well as public outreach, and contributes ecological knowledge essential for addressing land-use and management issues in grasslands.

The vision for North Temperate Lakes (NTL) LTER is to gain a predictive understanding of lakes and lake districts at longer and broader scales than has been traditional in limnology. We employ long-term observations, comparisons, experimental manipulations, and diverse modeling and statistical tools to understand change in social-ecological systems. Here, we highlight four ongoing initiatives that demonstrate our multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach to research.

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    The goals of the EAP-ILTER information management are: 1. to create a data legacy for current and future uses; and 2. to provide policy makers with science-based environmental information. Metadata is one of the keys to achieve the goals. A framework of an ecological information management prototype based on EML is proposed, tested, and evaluated over the last five years in EAP-ILTER.

Urban ecology is evolving as the scientific base grows and new concerns of urban partners emerge. In the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), both of these drivers are at work.

 The primary research focus of the Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) LTER is on the relative importance of bottom-up processes and allochthonous inputs to giant kelp forests, a highly diverse and productive marine ecosystem that occurs on shallow rocky reefs at the interface of the land-ocean margin. Giant kelp forests are found along the temperate coasts of western North and South America, southern Africa, Australia and most sub Antarctic islands, including Tasmania and New Zealand.

Research at the FCE-LTER builds on a substantial body of knowledge about oligotrophic estuaries. In particular, we study how changes in hydrology caused by human activities interact with natural disturbances and sea-level rise to affect dynamics in the estuarine ecotone of the Everglades. The greater Everglades ecosystem is the site of the world’s largest ecosystem restoration efforts, with aims to restore freshwater flow into this highly engineered landscape.

The conversion of agricultural and rural lands for development purposes reflects one of the greatest threats to key ecosystem services in the United States. This poster addresses land use change dynamics in southern Florida, linking them to local governance-zoning institutions. Study of land use and zoning patterns informs broader questions of relevance to the LTER, including: “What is the pattern of land and water use change in urban and working systems: what are the temporal and spatial patterns of human activity and ecosystem dynamics in LTER regions?