Author: Jen Holzer Cairngorms LTSER Israeli musicians Ehud Banai and the Refugees muse in the 1987 song, “Magic of the Galil”: “…I imagined Scotland as Tavor Mountain one dark night when I froze from cold a guitar helped me the fire helped me the morning of renewing light helped me….” While longing for... Continue Reading →
Adventures in the stoichiometry of Braila Island, Research Center in Systems Ecology and Sustainability
Author: Shabnam G.Farahani Braila eLTER My scientific trip to Romania started on September 2nd, 2017. On the following day, I visited the Faculty of Biology, of the University of Bucharest where I met the intimate staff of Biogeochemical Circuits laboratory. On Monday morning after meeting the team from the Research Center in Systems Ecology and Sustainability, we... Continue Reading →
CaveGIS – bringing location analysis to the underground
Author: Vojkan Gavojić eLTER TA site: Postojna Planina Cave System (PPSC) Postojna-Planina cave systems’ consists of more than 30 km long passages of Postojnska and Planinska jama caves. Their passages collect and conduct surface and underground waters from Pivka and Cerknica and release them to Planinsko polje. It also represents the most biologically diverse cave... Continue Reading →
Contrast & Cadence
By Kelsey Bisson For a while the ocean existed to me as an abstraction. I grew up in Ohio and I’d never been. I imagined it to be the deepest, darkest, scariest, most enchanting thing on Earth and even so, I couldn’t quite imagine it exactly -- it was just too big, too distant, too... Continue Reading →
Atmospheric nitrogen deposition may endanger carbon storage in peatlands – how do the fungi respond?
By Heikki Kiheri, Natural Resources Institute Finland Approximately one third of global soil carbon is stored in northern peatlands as slowly decomposing organic material. Peat carbon is accumulated due to net imbalance of production and decomposition. This enormous amount of carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere by plants and accumulated under the waterlogged, acidic conditions... Continue Reading →
Vistas of place-based research in Scotland’s Cairngorms
By Jen Holzer In December 2016, funded by an eLTER Transnational Access grant, I made a visit to the Cairngorms Long Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platform. The Cairngorms LTSER is the only such platform in the UK; its boundaries are the same as those of the Cairngorms National Park, established in 2003. My mission: to... Continue Reading →
Kelp forest boot camp
By Joey Peters This past summer I took advantage of an offer to get an early start on my research project in kelp forests off the coast of Santa Barbara. It’s hard to convey here, but I could not have been more thrilled. To put it in perspective, imagine that you’re working in an office... Continue Reading →
Short term trends in long term research?
By Alexandra Linz It’s 4:00AM. Between prepping equipment and anxiety about today’s experiments, I only got a couple hours of sleep last night, but I’m full of adrenaline and ready to go. My undergraduate student and I drive to our first sampling site in beautiful northern Wisconsin, USA. The sun isn’t up yet, but the loons... Continue Reading →
Plants and Nitrogen – a love & hate relationship
Author: Melanie Batista of Universidade de Lisboa Hi there! I want to tell you about my visit to the LTER site at Whim Bog, Edinburgh, Scotland. The Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, based on the Natural Environment Research Council, manages a LTER site with facilities to study the effects of dry and wet nitrogen deposition. Nitrogen... Continue Reading →
In the realm of blueberries and moss… radiometry measurements at Kindla Integrated Monitoring site, Sweden
By Jan Pisek, Senior Research Fellow, Tartu Observatory, Estonia The BRACE project (Background Reflectance ACross Europe) is one of 23 small projects supported by the eLTER H2020 project’s Transnational Access scheme (which is funded by the European Union). The objective of the project is to collect in situ measured background/understory reflectance data across diverse ecosystem... Continue Reading →