EcoTrends Biogeochemistry Project
The EcoTrends project was initiated in 2004 as a multi-site, individual investigator project that subsequently expanded into a network-wide initiative that directly supports the Decadal Plan and ISSE. EcoTrends provides a link between long-term data sets from all 26 LTER sites with data from an additional 24 long-term sites funded by other agencies (see the Ecotrends website link in the working group materials). At present, the EcoTrends project has >1200 datasets on climate, biogeochemistry, disturbance, and biotic responses as well as >10,000 datasets at the county level for human population and economy data. A book describing these datasets will be submitted for publication this fall after the data have been verified and checked by the individual sites and PIs. In addition, a first-generation web site containing these data was recently released.
The EcoTrends project received funding from the LNO for a series of working groups to develop papers based on the EcoTrends datasets. One of these groups was focused on Biogeochemistry and met in May 2009 in Syracuse to develop a manuscript based on EcoTrends data on precipitation inputs and streamwater outputs of nitrogen, sulfur, calcium and chloride. We hope to use these analyses as a platform for addressing questions about how ecosystem processing of atmospheric inputs is influenced by climate and other factors across multiple sites.
Here we request an ASM Working Group to 1) continue work on the paper started at the Syracuse workshop and 2) present and discuss our findings with a larger group of LTER scientists. In addition to completing our paper, we hope to develop ideas for new products based on existing or potentially new EcoTrends datasets.
This workshop is complementary to a workshop to be proposed by Sherri Johnson and John Melack to develop a biogeochemistry database (CHEMDB).