We are now entering the third year of the Long-Term Decomposition Experiment Team (LIDET), with a total of 28 sites and over 35 investigators. Most sites have completed the second year of field work and laboratory data analysis is progressing. All sites received first-year data summaries, files and supporting documentation last fall; second-year data should be available by early summer 1993. Drs. Aber, Moorhead, Parton, and Rastetter are in the middle of a comparative study of decomposition models, and are completing a manuscript summarizing that effort. We have also completed a draft manuscript for submission by LIDET to BioScience. A brief snippet from the conclusions section is included below:
“To answer the challenges of global change research there is a need to understand ecosystem behavior over longer temporal and larger spatial scales than have been traditionally examined in ecology. Several solutions to this problem of scaling-up are possible. Synthesis of past results from individual investigators is a critical step, but uneven geographic distributions, study durations, and methodological incompatibilities all limit the end result. An alternative is to design group or team experiments, such as LIDET, that can be carried out simultaneously at many sites. In addition to standardizing methods and predetermining spatial and temporal limits, this approach has benefits for the individual sites involved. These include placing the results of an individual site in a larger context, allowing general access to novel analytical methods (i.e. NW), and creating a real sense of participation in global change research.”