| NSF Org: |
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | February 24, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 1, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 1637685 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Betsy Von Holle
mvonholl@nsf.gov (703)292-4974 DEB Division Of Environmental Biology BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | March 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | February 28, 2025 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $6,762,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $6,762,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2018 = $1,127,000.00 FY 2019 = $1,127,000.00 FY 2020 = $1,929,331.00 FY 2021 = $324,669.00 FY 2022 = $1,127,000.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2801 SHARON TPKE MILLBROOK NY US 12545-5721 (845)677-7600 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
2801 Sharon Turnpike Millbrook NY US 12545-0129 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | LONG TERM ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH |
| Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002223DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
The Hubbard Brook (HBR) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project is an interdisciplinary research program focused on improving the understanding and management of Northern Forest ecosystems. These important natural resources that contribute ecosystem services such as carbon storage, nutrient cycling, water and air purification, and wildlife habitat are impacted by natural and man-made disturbances. Those disturbances include climate variation, air pollution, invasive species and forest harvesting, and this research focuses on how forest ecosystems respond to those disturbances. Despite a long record of research on forest ecosystems, recent observations from HBR of how trees move water through the ecosystem, the role of calcium in forest health, the movement of nitrogen through the ecosystem, and the interactions of plants, insects, and birds within the forest indicate that much is still unknown. Most of the research will occur within the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, a site in the White Mountain region of New Hampshire that is operated by the U.S. Forest Service. The research team will measure the forms of nitrogen retained in soils, the growth and death of trees, the fates of germinating tree seedlings, the amounts and types of litter fall, rates of soil respiration, and how fine roots respond to nitrogen and phosphorus additions. They also will test how the exchanges of gases, heat, and water vapor between forests and the atmosphere respond to the timing of leaf out in the spring and leaf fall in the autumn. Information about forested ecosystems and the streams that drain them will be made available to land managers through a Forest Science Dialogues Program and a Science Policy Exchange and will inform policy and management decisions on a regional and national scale. The educational and outreach activities planned, including development of classroom curricula for middle- and high school students, a Research Experience for Undergraduates program that is organized in partnership with Plymouth State University, the training of teachers through the Research Experiences for Teachers program, and development of Waterviz, a water cycle visualization tool, will bring ecological knowledge to the public as well as students and teachers at levels from K-12 to graduate school.
The conceptual model underpinning the HBR-LTER project envisions three principal types of disturbance acting as drivers of change in the ecosystem: atmospheric chemistry, climate, and biota. The effects of these drivers play out on geophysical and historical templates that include variation across the landscape in bedrock, soils, hydrology, climate and history of past disturbance. Within the ecosystem, the disturbances affect the interacting processes of hydrology, biogeochemistry, vegetation dynamics and food web dynamics. Research on the changing atmosphere is focused primarily on the legacies of past air pollution, particularly the depletion of nutrient cations such as calcium from the soil and the accumulation of nitrogen in soil and vegetation. Research on the impacts of climate is focused on causes of the observed long-term decline in evapotranspiration at the site and the effects of changing timing and duration of seasonal transitions on plants, soils, microbes, animals and stream ecosystems. Research on biotic change is focused on the changing composition and structure of the forests caused by multiple interacting stressors including climate, new plant species immigrations, invasive forest pests, and altered disturbance regimes. Research methods include: long-term field measurements with stable isotopes to provide a better resolution of the strengths of nitrogen sinks in soils and metagenomics shotgun sequencing of community DNA (Illumina HiSeq platform) to provide initial characterization of how microbial community composition and function vary with soil depth; field experiments to identify belowground responses that mediate nutrient recycling and plant uptake in response to nutrient additions and the ensuing impacts on soil enzyme activities, microbial nutrient pools and turnover, rhizosphere allocation, and mycorrhizal functional groups; simulation modeling with quantitative models such as stand-level ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycling models, a carbon and nitrogen model parameterized for individual tree species, an ecosystem demography model, and a multiple element limitation model to synthesize data and experimental knowledge will be used to identify knowledge gaps, develop hypotheses, and make prediction of future forest behavior; and laboratory studies including 15N NMR to better determine the forms of nitrogen retained in soil organic matter. Education activities include hosting school groups at the site, hands-on training of teachers in scientific research, mentoring undergraduate student research projects, and facilitating research by graduate students. Outreach activities include synthesizing results of research done at HBR and elsewhere, and communicating the science to local stakeholders through roundtable discussions, to the public through targeted media, and to policy makers through briefings and publications addressing specific policy questions.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This grant funded the Hubbard Brook Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project (HBR) from March 2016 – February 2025. The mission of the HBR program is to improve understanding of the response of Northern Forest ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Our principal research site is the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of NH. The conceptual model guiding our research envisions disturbance playing out on a geophysical and historical template that influences the biogeochemistry, vegetation, hydrology and food webs of the Northern Forest. We organize our research around three drivers of disturbance: (1) changing atmospheric chemistry, (2) changing climate; and (3) changing biota, which includes changes in forest structure and plant and animal species composition. Our long-term measurements and experiments have led to seminal research in trends, impacts and recovery from acid rain and other forms of atmospheric deposition, ecological impacts of forest harvesting practices, long-term vegetation dynamics in forests, and trends in songbird populations. Our research has evolved in response to results (many surprising) from long-term data collection; future research will emphasize interactions among disturbances and legacies of past disturbance.
Some key results over the past six years of research include the elevational distribution of some tree species shifted upward, as expected in response to climate warming. However, other species have surprisingly migrated downward in response to succession, recovery from acid deposition (i.e., deacidification), and pests and pathogens. Rates of evapotranspiration abruptly increased by about 30% over the past 10 years. The drivers of this fundamental change in ecosystem function involve complex interactions among climate, biota, and atmospheric chemistry. Exports of nitrogen (N) from our untreated reference watershed continue to decline (since the 1970s), contrary to established theory that the opposite should be occurring in these aging forests. An N oligotrophication process, driven by declines in atmospheric N deposition, increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and growing season length and temperature, and decreases in acid deposition may be driving these declines. We observed significant declines in birds, salamanders, caterpillars, and beetles since the 1970s, but not all species have declined in all places. Analysis of long-term (>50 year) biology and biogeochemistry data from HBR for early warning signals of state change suggest declining resilience in watershed nutrient retention and tree, bird, and insect populations.
HBR research is tightly coupled to an extensive program of education and outreach led by the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (HBRF). Recent successes include a synthesis of winter climate change in the northern forest, a synthesis of social and ecological resilience in New Hampshire, and a series of stakeholder dialogues related to invasive forest pests, ice storms, and sugar maple regeneration. A new professional development program for young scientists, Young Voices of Science (YVoS), began in 2020 and follows a participant-centered cohort model that pairs a semester-long series of online, skills-based seminars with one-on-one mentorship for outreach projects and policy engagements. Events for early-career scientists included a 2020 Youth Climate and Clean Energy Town Hall with U.S. presidential candidates in February 2020, a Climate and Clean Energy Forum with members of U.S. Congress and the Biden/Harris Administration in March 2021, and a Road to COP26 virtual conference with the British Consul General to New England in October 2021. HBRF’s Schoolyard LTER program includes partnerships with K-12 schools, including “Zoom-a-Scientist” activities that bring HBR scientists virtually into classrooms, and educational field trips and tours. These activities have engaged 1,700 students from 74 towns across New Hampshire over the past 5 years. HBRF partnered with the USDA Forest Service (USFS) to advance HBR’s Art-Science program, including its flagship project, Waterviz, a water cycle visualization and sonification, powered by near-real-time sensor data from HBR. Classroom materials have been developed to bring Waterviz into middle school classrooms, with a focus on serving students with visual impairments and other seen and unseen disabilities.
The Information Management System at HBR has four goals: (1) maintaining access to high quality data/documentation (2) enabling data discovery/access (3) development and maintenance of a project website and (4) maintenance of a database inventory of the physical sample archive. HBR data are submitted to the Environmental Data Initiative Repository (EDI) with a Creative Commons CC-BY license, and are discoverable on the HBR website, the EDI data portal, DataONE, DataCite, and Google Datasearch. All HBR-LTER data are registered in the NSF Publication Access Repository (PAR). The HBR data catalog contains over 300 data packages ranging from single year studies to long-term data collections (some in excess of 65 years).
Partnerships are essential at HBR. The USDA Forest Service (USFS) operates the ~3500 ha Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest and its onsite facilities, and provides the foundational data for hydrology and meteorology. The HBRF is also a key partner, supporting facilities for HBR researchers and leading our education and outreach activities.
Last Modified: 04/19/2025
Modified by: Peter M Groffman
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