Network News

In early May, the LTER Network Office organized a training workshop on “Software tools for Sensor Networks” that was attended by 24 trainees, 10 trainers and speakers, and a diverse mix of research

The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network will once again be prominently represented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, August 5-10. The LTER exhibit will be spread through booths 319-320 and 419-420. The LTER Network Office will co-host the booth with the Andrews Forest, California Current Ecosystem, and Santa Barbara Coastal LTER sites.

Summer heat is no surprise in the Sonoran Desert, but urban temperatures in the Phoenix metropolitan area can exceed those of the surrounding desert, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. An interdisciplinary group of the Central Arizona-Phoenix (CAP) LTER researchers has been instrumental in studying the UHI effect in Phoenix, creating a substantial and influential body of research, which is detailed in a recent article http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00011.1 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The 2012 LTER Science Council meeting was held from May 15-17 at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest. The first full day of activities included the Executive Board (EB) meeting.

A number of scientists led by Florida Coastal Everglades (FCE) Long Term Ecological Research scientist, James Fourqurean, have concluded that seagrasses may play a vital role in solving climate change.

A recent paper published in PLoS ONE by U.S. and international long term ecological research scientists quantifying the ecological effects of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Chile in 2010 is attracting a lot of attention from popular and scientific media.

WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 6, 2012—As global temperatures rise, the most threatened ecosystems are those that depend on a season of snow and ice, scientists from the nation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network say.

LTER and NEON are highly complementary networks that support ecological research in different ways, but are becoming more and more integrated over time.