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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 12:58 PM |
| The National Science Foundation is funding a microbial biodiversity survey and inventory that will take place across all the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. Known as MIRADA (Microbial Inventory Research Across Diverse Aquatic) LTERs, the biodiversity survey and inventory will take advantage of the aquatic sampling locations that are part of the established LTER network. It will build on existing infrastructure for coordination at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA, set in place by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-supported ocean realm project called the International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM).The MBL houses three of the principal investigators from a total of the 13 participating LTERs: John Hobbie (ARC), Chuck Hopkinson (PIE) and Hugh Ducklow (PAL), as well as Mitch Sogin (the lead PI) and Linda Amaral-Zettler, the Secretariat and Education and Outreach lead of ICoMM. |
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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 12:45 PM |
A critical tool for enabling adaptive responses to climate change
Phenology is a sensitive measure of climatic variation and change, is relatively simple to record and understand, and is vital to both the scientific and public interest with or without climate change. Integration of spatially-extensive phenological data and models with both short and long-term climatic forecasts offer a powerful and necessary agent for human adaptation to ongoing climate change. However, the predictive potential of phenology requires a new data resource—a national network of integrated phenological observations and the tools to access and analyze them at multiple scales.
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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 11:29 AM |
| The past year, like all odd years, was marked by mid-term site reviews: with 11 visits, this was the largest of the three Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) award cohorts. In contrast, we had six site visits in 2005 and we will have nine in ‘09. The geographic coverage was also the largest: from the Arctic tundra (ARC) in northern Alaska, to the first review of the Moorea Coral Reef (MCR) in French Polynesia, to the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MCM) in Antarctica, and up the east coast to Plum Island (PIE) in northern Massachusetts and Hubbard Brook (HBR) in northern New Hampshire. And finally, the “biome” coverage was also extensive, including marine, desert, urban, forest, tundra, and coastal sites. In the process, both Henry Gholz and Bob Waide became likely the first people to have visited all 26 LTER sites. |
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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 11:23 AM |
| Some of society’s most important scientific questions have little to do with space travel, human disease, theoretical physics, or new math. Instead, they deal with issues such as the future of Earth’s soil. |
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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 11:18 AM |
The LINX experience
Recently a paper appeared in Nature (Mulholland et al. 2008) covering some of the core results of the second phase of the Lotic Intersite Nitrogen Experiment, known as LINX. This large, cross-site study has been funded by NSF and includes a number of LTER sites and investigators. In this article we relate our experience with publicizing the work, which evidently has been successful.
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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 11:17 AM |
| Modern science is increasingly collaborative. But while collaboration has always been a part of science, those who collaborated in the past were often collocated. Today, science needs to be able to take advantage of specialized talent available regardless of location. |
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| Posted on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 11:09 AM |
| A collaboration with the Center for Rapid Environmental Assessment and Terrain Evaluation (CREATE) at the University of New Mexico is providing near real-time satellite data for most LTER sites. The direct readout facilities at CREATE download direct broadcast MODIS data from both the Aqua and Terra satellites. |
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| Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 05:23 PM |
| The plan for cyberinfrastructure (CI) support for future LTER research has just been released as part of the “‘Decadal Science Plan for LTER”. The CI strategic plan was commissioned as part of the overall LTER Network planning process with the express purpose of identifying CI critical to meeting LTER’s research and education objectives. As part of this process, the CI planners convened a large and diverse group of information technology (IT) professionals from science and technology centers, large IT development projects, and national observatory initiatives. |
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| Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 05:23 PM |
| Giant kelp forests are amongst the most productive ecosystems on Earth. They provide food and shelter for a highly diverse community of fish, invertebrates and under story algae. Kelp forests are also highly dynamic ecosystems. Maximum growth rates for giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) fronds can exceed a foot a day while entire kelp forests can be wiped out by a single winter storm. |
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| Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 05:00 PM |
| Golden foliage greeted a dozen writers and a handful of scientists at the Bonanza Creek (BNZ) LTER site outside of Fairbanks on a recent Sunday in September. The focus of their interest was the 2004 Bondary Fire, one of the largest fires of that record fire season, which scorched 6.7 million acres. Together we looked at the ecological consequences and remembered the year that it occurred. Was the ecosystem devastated or was this part of natural rhythms of boreal forests? How did that summer’s smoke color the perceptions of Fairbanks residents about boreal wildfires, which had robbed them of that scarce resource called summer? |
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