Seven years of oceanic and meteorological monitoring data have been collected in the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER domain from 2002-2009 in order to understand the spatial and temporal patterns of temperature and salinity across the domain. Empirical orthogonal function analysis shows that temperature changes with time are dominated by 1 principal component (explains 93% of the variability) which is strongly correlated with atmospheric fluxes.

The Chihuahuan Desert, similar to many arid and semiarid ecosystems, has experienced dramatic changes in vegetation structure and ecosystem processes over the past 150 years. This “desertification” is manifested by the broad-scale expansion of unpalatable woody plants into perennial grasslands with associated loss of grasses and increase in soil degradation that compromise the ecosystem services provided to human populations.

 Landscapes in the southeastern U.S. are expected to change profoundly in the next five decades. Changes in climate and land use will especially impact the rural and quasi-rural lands that still characterize much of southern Appalachia. Coweeta LTER research between 2008-14 will extend long-term measurements, field experiments and interdisciplinary modeling from small watershed studies to regional-scale analyses so as to account for increases in resource demand and competition from adjacent and more distant areas.

<Mt. Malindang Natural Park is one of the Philippine LTER sites. It is  protected area and situated on an extinct volcano in the province of Misamis Occidental, Philippines. The natural resources of the park are being threatened by the economic activities of the local people. Deforestation in Mt Malindang has reduced the water supply in the upland and lowland areas of the park. This project was conducted to rehabilitate the degraded forest ecosysytem in the park by replanting indigenous tree species involving the local communities.

Wind and Water erosion are two dominant, interrelated transport processes that influence the dynamics of arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Complex interactions between wind and water erosion and transport events vary across different landscape units, exhibiting varying degrees of dominance; thereby, affecting soil types, topography, and the movement of soil parent material over spatial and temporal scales. Historic and prehistoric interactions of these erosion events between different landform units are poorly documented in the stratigraphic record.

Social scientists, policymakers, and the public need to understand how inhabitants of exurbanized areas think about and perceive their land. This study used a combination of the PhotoVoice and participatory GIS method to capture these perceptions. Our results show that while exurban development is commonly discussed as a phenomenon related to “sprawl”, people do not actually perceive development as systemic, but instead focus on development patches that are located in restricted locations.

The Pantanal wetland is one of the largest wetlands in the world (ca. 140.000 km2). Most of the time series collected from this natural system result in partial data set, specially water quality, thus compromising the performance of usual statistical analysis. The main goal of this research is to apply a new computational methodology for short time series analysis, showing non-linear behaviour in the time, amplitude and frequency domains to understand the hydro-ecological functioning of this river-floodplain system.

Research at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) LTER site focuses on understanding the ecology of intensive field crop production and its environmental consequences. This topic cuts across biological disciplines ranging from agroecology to evolutionary biology, making our work both timely and important for stakeholders as diverse as farmers and K-12 students and teachers.

Palmer LTER has as its focus the marine continental shelf and marginal sea ice zone ecosystems off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is a marine pelagic and coastal site strongly influenced by the formation, extent, duration and retreat of sea ice. Over the past several decades sea ice duration has declined by 90 days and no longer persists into the summer period in our study region. At the same time, the mean wintertime (DJF) surface air temperature has increased by 6°C.

Images and Scenes from the 2006 LTER All Scientists Meeting