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News Release 18-107

Scientists to present new long-term ecological research findings at fall American Geophysical Union meeting

NSF-funded researchers will delve into the hidden realms of ice-covered lakes, deep soil processes, plant roots

Changing patterns of ice formation and melting are affecting winter microbial activity in lakes.

Changing patterns of ice formation and melting are affecting winter microbial activity in lakes.


November 28, 2018

This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.

Find related stories on NSF's Long-Term Ecological Research Program at this link.

Microbes and plant roots are hard at work under snow and ice, deep in desert soils, and in the ground beneath our feet. Their activities affect water clarity, salt marsh survival, the impact of drought and the pace of climate change.

New results presented by National Science Foundation (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) scientists at the 2018 American Geophysical Union fall meeting reveal hidden realms in ice-covered lakes and deep soils. The conference will take place from Dec. 10 to Dec. 14 in Washington, D.C.

NSF's LTER Network is made up of 28 sites in ecosystems from freshwater lakes and deserts to salt marshes and forests.

NSF LTER findings presented at the conference include:

Scientists affiliated with the North Temperate Lakes LTER site in Wisconsin are conducting research on the importance of microbial activity in frozen lakes. The results will help researchers predict the effects of longer ice-free periods on water quality and fish populations.

Studies of deep soil layers at two LTER sites, Hubbard Brook and Harvard Forest in the U.S. Northeast, show that more frequent freeze and thaw cycles in winter are leading to more active microbes and a greater production of carbon dioxide in deep soils.

At the Jornada Basin LTER site in New Mexico, scientists studying the effects of drought on plant leaves and roots are finding that the above-ground portion of desert shrubs recovers rapidly from severe drought, but that plants facing successive droughts lose more roots with each incident.

Other NSF LTER presentations will address such topics as coastal sediment transport, the pace of permafrost thaw, the mechanisms involved in salt marsh collapse and the resilience of mangrove ecosystems to the effects of hurricanes. Scientists affiliated with a new NSF LTER site -- the Northeast U.S. Shelf -- will present information on the importance of marine plankton to fisheries.

LTER and related presentations include the following:

Monday, December 10

Quantifying plant-available soil moisture in topographically complex terrain

08:00 am- 12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Non-linear shift from grassland to shrubland in temperate barrier islands

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Application of machine-learning tools to extract patterns in long-term DOC monitoring data: an integrated, multi-scale approach

9:15-9:30 am

Convention Ctr - 156

Influence of Wrack on Coastal Foredune Development and Dune Habitat Complexity

9:30-9:45 am

Convention Ctr - 145B

Strengthening the biogeosciences in environmental research networks

10:35-10:50 am

Convention Ctr - 156

Identifying the spatial impact and temporal legacy of a single extreme warm event on the runoff generation efficiency of glaciers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica

11:06-11:09 pm

Convention Ctr - eLightning Theater II

Assessing Spatiotemporal Variability in Mountain Ecosystem Productivity with Multispectral Unmanned Aerial Systems

1:40-1:55 pm

Convention Ctr - 145A

Model Utilization of Land Cover Data Products in Heterogeneous Urban Areas: Development Density Bias and Correction

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Defining the Importance of Upland Landscapes Using Critical Zone and Other Similar Observatories

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Unexpected patterns of grassland root production during and after repeated extreme droughts

2:10-2:25 pm

Convention Ctr - 149AB

 

Tuesday, December 11

Projections of future stream water chemistry under the Representative Concentration Pathways in an old-growth Douglas-fir forest of the Pacific Northwest using a biogeochemical model with improved algorithm on soil cation exchange capacity

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Relationship between shrub cover and plant available water in a U.S. Southwest desert

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

The Role of Broad-scale Climate in the Periodic Northern Expansion of Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Incidence in North America

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

NES-LTER: A New Long Term Ecological Research Site on the Northeast U.S. Shelf

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

CCHDO: delivering high quality hydrographic data from the Southern Ocean and beyond

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

The Different Responses of Arctic Terrestrial and Aquatic Food Webs to Long-term Nutrient Additions

9:30-9:45 am

Convention Ctr - 143A-C

A Stream-Side Mesocosm Study of Organic Matter Processing in the Hyporheic Zone

10:35 - 10:50 am

Convention Ctr - 151A

Development and Application of Percentile-Range Indexed Mapping and Evaluation (PRIME) Tool for Long Term Ecological Assessment

11:20-11:35 am

Convention Ctr - 145A

Coupled Interaction of Shrubs, Dunes, and Barrier Overwash

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Classification mapping of salt marsh vegetation by flexible monthly NDVI time-series using Landsat imagery

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Modeling Long-Term Salt Marsh Response to Sea Level Rise and Human Impacts in the Sediment Deficient Plum Island Estuary, MA

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Digging down: How respiration from different soil depths responds to climate change

3:25-3:40 pm

Convention Ctr - 150B

 

Wednesday, December 12

Numerical Modeling of Historical and Projected Permafrost Soil Temperatures with Carbon Flux Implications

8:00 am-12:20pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Interactive effects of seagrass and the microphytobenthos on sediment suspension within shallow coastal bays

8am-12 noon

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Facilitating data discovery on the Internet using sitemaps.org and schema.org dataset metadata through the Environmental Data Initiative Data Portal

8:04-8:07am

Convention Ctr - eLightning Theater II

Warming and nitrogen addition alters soil organic matter composition in a temperate forest soil

10:20-10:35 am

Convention Ctr - 150A

Research is more valuable when its data are published

10:27-10:30 am

Convention Ctr - eLightning Theater II

Leveraging network science to evaluate mechanisms and models of soil organic matter stabilization and change

10:50-11:05 am

Convention Ctr - 150A

Linking continental scale ice loss to winter biogeochemistry in north temperate lakes

11:05-11:20 am

Convention Ctr - 149AB

Concentration-Discharge Responses to Storm Events in Coastal California Watersheds

11:35 - 11:50 am

Convention Ctr - 145B

Assessing salt marsh resilience with sediment fluxes: the critical role of marine sediment inputs

1:40-1:55 pm

Convention Ctr - 149AB

Concentration-Discharge Responses to Storm Events in Coastal California Watersheds

11:35 - 11:50 am

Convention Ctr - 145B

Assessing salt marsh resilience with sediment fluxes: the critical role of marine sediment inputs

1:40-1:55 pm

Convention Ctr - 149AB

Assessing Changes in Hyporheic Storage from Over Two Decades of Diel Flood Recessions in Antarctic Streams

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Seagrass impact on sediment exchange between tidal flats and salt marsh and the sediment budget of shallow bays

5:30-5:45 pm

Convention Ctr - 145B

 

Thursday, December 13

     

Using ontologies to operationalize Essential Biodiversity Variables

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Soil creep in a New England salt marsh: fast, seasonal, and likely mediated by vegetation

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

The Environmental Data Initiative's Approach To Data Publishing Training For Research Teams

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Consequences of Extreme Rainfall Patterns on Nitrous Oxide Fluxes in Midwest Cropping Systems

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Heterogeneous patterns of mangrove disturbance and recovery from Hurricane Irma

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Measuring the Effects of Long-term Nitrogen Fertilization on Soil Carbon Cycling in Two Tropical Forests

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Employing Remote Sensing Techniques to Quantify Sediment Supply and Evaluate Marsh Vulnerability in the Plum Island Estuary

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

The impact of offshore waves and vegetation on the sediment budget in the Virginia Coast Reserve (VA)

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Influence of Ocean Acidification and Climate Change on the Biogeochemistry in the Gulf of Alaska: A regional modeling study

8:00-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Increasing accumulation of soil organic matter in mangrove forests could indicate greater-than-expected resilience to sea-level rise and enhance the ongoing carbon sink capacity

9:15-9:30 am

Convention Ctr - 147B

Water Stable Isotope Ratios Reveal Network Scale Variability in Base Flow Water Sources in a Western Cascades headwater stream network

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Will mangrove encroachment mitigate carbon loss with saltwater intrusion in subtropical coastal wetlands?

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Drivers and Mechanisms of Peat Collapse in Coastal Wetlands

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Exploration of Sentinel-1 InSAR observations for Monitoring Water Level Changes in Everglades Florida

1:40-6:00 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Supporting Teachers to Identify Natural Phenomena Through the Storylines Embedded in Online Earth Science Datasets

2:04-2:10 pm

Convention Ctr - 209A-C

 

Friday, December 14

Fate of cohesive sediments in a marsh-dominated estuary

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Harnessing the Power of Open Data and Analytics for Characterizing the Role of Hydrological Processes in the Spread of a Vector-borne Livestock Disease in Multiple Watersheds across the Western US

8:00 am-12:20 pm

Convention Ctr - Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Multi-year and multi-season transcriptomic profiling of forest tree species from LTER sites for understanding latitudinal variation in growth performance.

9:24-9:36 am

Convention Ctr - 149AB

Energy balance changes drive differential response to simulated warming in an alpine and subalpine snowpack

10:20-10:35 am

Convention Ctr - Salon G

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF, (703) 292-7734, email: cdybas@nsf.gov

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