Understanding biodiversity and the factors that govern it are important components of an environmental literacy framework. Yet, students rarely graduate from K-12 institutions with a robust understanding of biodiversity, particularly of their local ecosystems. Given the wealth of expertise in biodiversity science within the LTER network and education activities at LTER sites, we have the opportunity to build unique collaborations that continue to enhance ecological literacy.

Ecological complexity, a new but rapidly developing field integrating complexity theory and ecosystem function, can provide insights to tackle critical environmental problems. Here, ecological complexity is not merely describing complicated systems, but complex in the sense of studying many interacting components controlled by drivers operating across multiple scales.

Both increases and decreases in diversity have been documented in urban areas, with suggested explanations ranging from species-productivity relationships to habitat fragmentation, introduced species, disturbance and pollution. For landscape planning and urban wildlife management, it is imperative to understand which processes act in determining diversity in urban habitats. For over ten years we have monitored arthropod communities with pitfall traps in the Central Arizona Phoenix area in residential areas and compared them to desert and desert remnant sites.

Patterns of phenology for plants and animals control ecosystem processes, determine land surface properties, control biosphere-atmosphere interactions, and affect food production, health, conservation, and recreation. Although phenological data and models have applications related to scientific research, education and outreach, agriculture, tourism and recreation, human health, and natural resource conservation and management, until recently there was no coordinated effort to understand phenology at the national scale.

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.

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.

Species diversity is expected to promote stability in ecosystem functions such as productivity. One mechanism that may contribute to stability is compensatory dynamics. Compensatory dynamics, which occur when an increase in density (biomass) of one species is associated with a decrease in another, are indicated by negative species covariances. These may be driven by competition or negatively correlated species responses to environmental drivers.