Population growth and urban sprawl are two issues that have long concerned environmentalists. Another, more modern phenomenon is that of urban to rural migration, wherein residents of urban or suburban areas buy property in areas more rural, less developed. This study is concerned with the land use decisions made by these new rural residents. The study is centered in Southwest Michigan, Barry Township within Barry County. The area is one of shifting land use patterns and increasing residential development.

Dynamic biogeochemical watershed models are the only practical approach that can predict concurrent exposure to multiple environmental factors and consider interactive effects between climate change, atmospheric deposition and CO2 fertilization effect. Therefore, they could be powerful tools to help to understand the long-term effects of climate change on ecosystems.

Bacteria community dynamics and metabolism are relevant to understanding the mechanism of phosphorus cycling in eutrophic lake systems. In Lake Mendota, WI, heterotrophic bacterial abundance as measured by catalyzed reporter deposition fluorescence in situ hybridization (CARD FISH), 33PO4-3 uptake and regeneration, 14C- leucine incorporation, alkaline phosphatase activity, and a suite of chemical analysis were measured during 2009 ice-off period in order to identify seasonal and spatial trends.

Documenting the trajectories of ecological communities following a disturbance represents one of the five core research themes central to LTER network science. Quantifying degrees of resilience, here defined as the time needed for a community to return to a previous steady or quasi-steady state following a disturbance, can be especially challenging when ecosystems experience multiple perturbations that, in combination, can cause complex, non-linear community responses.

A key climatic feature of the Shortgrass Steppe is the summertime pattern of moderate to large precipitation events, separated by weeks of hot, dry conditions. These precipitation events have potential to revive plants, microbes and soil fauna that became less active in the intervening dry period, and thus structure ecosystem-scale patterns including net carbon exchange.

Ecosystem processes in northern systems depend heavily on inputs of biologically fixed nitrogen (N) from A. tenuifolia, which contributes the majority of N accumulated during boreal forest succession. However because of the high phosphorus (P) demands of this plant, we hypothesize that N-fixation inputs are controlled by the ability of alder to assimilate P through associations with ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF), which produce enzymes that mobilize organic and recalcitrant P forms.

During May and June of 2006, the LTER CCE program launched a cruise off Point Conception closely following the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) line 80 and a valuable dataset was collected. These ocean variables include along-flow and cross-flow spatial gradients, vertical current shear, CTD and iron limitation.

A forest die-back caused by a beetle outbreak on lodgepole and limber pine was used to assess the relative importance of root inputs to the soil food web and chemistry of soils in the Colorado Front Range. We measured a suite of biological and chemical parameters at six sites containing both live and dead trees. We found an increase in amounts of soil inorganic N, decreased soil lable C, and thus a decreased soil labile C:N ratio.

 Experimental studies of phytoplankton growth and grazing processes were conducted in the California Current Ecosystem off Point Conception, California to test the hypothesis that growth and grazing losses determine, to first order, the local dynamics of phytoplankton in the upwelling circulation.

If long-term responses of plant photosynthesis to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels are similar or predictably different among species, functional types, and ecosystem types, general global models of CO₂ fertilization effects can effectively be developed. To address this issue we measured gas exchange rates of 13 perennial grassland species from four functional groups exposed to eleven years of long-term free-air CO₂ enrichment (eCO₂, +180 ppm above ambient CO₂, BioCON).