have changed, by synthesizing 20 time series ranging from 5 to 51 years of data collected from forest and grassland dominated watersheds across Europe, North America, and East Asia and across four climate types (tropical, temperate, Mediterranean, and boreal) using the International Long-Term Ecological Research Network. We hypothesized that sites with greater atmospheric N deposition have greater stream N export rates, but that climate has taken a stronger role as atmospheric deposition declines in many regions of the globe. We found declining trends in bulk ammonium and nitrate deposition, especially
Abstract. The International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Network was established in 1993and is now composed of thirty-eight national networks representing a diversity of ecosystems around the globe. Data generated by the ILTER Network are valuable for scientists addressing broad spatial and temporal scale research questions, but only if these data can be easily discovered, accessed, and understood. Challenges to publishing ILTER data have included unequal distribution among networks of information management expertise, user-friendly tools, and resources. Language and translation have also been issues. Despite these significant obstacles, ILTER information managers have formed grassroots partnerships and collaborated to provide information management training, adopt a common metadata standard, develop information management tools useful throughout the network, and organize scientist/ information manager workshops that encourage scientists to share and integrate data. Throughout this article, we share lessons learned from the successes of these grassroots international partnerships to inform others who wish to collaborate internationally on projects that depend on data sharing entailing similar management challenges.
The study of ecosystem processes over multiple scales of space and time is often best achieved using comparable data from multiple sites. Yet, long‐term ecological observatories have often developed their own data collection protocols. Here, we address this problem by proposing a set of ecological protocols suitable for widespread adoption by the ecological community. Scientists from the European ecological research community prioritized terrestrial ecosystem parameters that could benefit from a more consistent approach to data collection within the resources available at most long‐term ecological observatories. Parameters for which standard methods are in widespread use, or for which methods are evolving rapidly, were not selected. Protocols were developed by domain experts, building on existing methods where possible, and refined through a process of field testing and training. They address above‐ground plant biomass; decomposition; land use and management; leaf area index; soil mesofaunal diversity; soil C and N stocks, and greenhouse gas emissions from soils. These complement existing methods to provide a complete assessment of ecological integrity. These protocols offer integrated approaches to ecological data collection that are low cost and are starting to be used across the European Long Term Ecological Research community.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.