We are examining the growth, growth history and climate sensitivity of white and black spruce trees on the floodplains of the major rivers fed by glacial meltwater in Interior Alaska. To date we have sampled 624 trees on 41 sites distributed across 1,783 km of the Yukon River, 375 km of the Tanana River, and 370 km of the Kuskokwim River, for a total of 2,528 km of river length.

Malawi is a land of farmers and facing rampant environmental problems whose capability for restoration is made dimmer by the looming shadow of climate change and variability. The Malawi Environmental Observatory Network is a small candle flickering with light for identification of prioritized environmental problems and setting of the road map of how such monumental problems could efficiently be tackled with the available meager resources.

The temperate forests of eastern North America support high biodiversity and critical ecosystem functions while providing natural resources and cultural benefits to an expanding human population. The region is shaped by a legacy of landscape change: major shifts in climate, vegetation and disturbance at millennial time scales; extensive deforestation for agriculture in the 17th – 19th centuries; and abandonment of farmlands, natural reforestation and increasing urbanization through the mid-21st century.

Microorganisms have confounded biogeographers because of their high dispersal capability, small size, and vast diversity and abundance. Here we use pyrosequencing, bioinformatics tools, and geospatial modeling to reveal that the genetic relatedness of soil bacteria varies in a predictable pattern across a landscape. Microbial communities showed strong spatial autocorrelation to a distance of 240 meters and this pattern was driven by changes in the genetic relatedness and abundance of specific clades across the landscape.

This session is intended both for social and biophysical scientists who want to help develop a proposal for the kind of “multi-site, highly collaborative and integrated research initiative” envisioned by the LTER planning group. The focus will be on what the LTER planning process calls the “centerpiece” of the group's conceptual framework, as well as one of “Grand Challenges” to be addressed at the network level – “the dynamics of coupled human-natural ecosystems.”

Studies suggest that high-latitude plants should be more palatable to herbivores than low-latitude conspecifics. Few studies, however, have examined whether this increased plant palatability indicates better plant quality for herbivores. We worked with three plant species and six associated herbivores along the U.S. Atlantic Coast to examine whether plant quality for herbivores increases with latitudes, and whether herbivores show local adaptation to plants from their own geographic regions.

 Tropical reef ecosystems lie at the interface of productive, populated terrestrial coastlines and unproductive, oligotrophic oceanic waters. Corals and other dominant reef organisms maintain complex symbiotic interactions with both surficial and planktonic aquatic microbial communities, but the processes defining the composition and life history of these communities are poorly understood.

This workshop will introduce Virtual Field Trips version 2. We will explore developing an open access library of on-line, interactive virtual field trips for sites within the LTER Network. Individual field trips include site descriptions with links to data sources and on-line explorer tools, panoramic movies with hotspots linking to visual and audio descriptions of points of interest (teaching points), photo galleries that further describe key site features, and more.

The MIRADA LTERs project (see working group materials) is an  NSF-funded Microbial Biodiversity Survey and Inventory across all 13 of the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. The long-term objective of our study is to document and describe baseline diversity and relative abundance data for both common and rare members of microbial communities located in aquatic LTER sites and to relate this diversity to the underlying physical and chemical environment.