Climate change is a complicated phenomenon with a variety of both abrupt and gradual effects that scientists are working hard to uncover.
Climate change is a complicated phenomenon with a variety of both abrupt and gradual effects that scientists are working hard to uncover. Emerging findings on how various ecosystems are responding to a changing climate, stemming from long-term research conducted through the National Science Foundation’s 40-year-old Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, have now been published in a series of articles in the journal BioScience.
UC Santa Barbara’s Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) LTER(link is external) and Moorea Coral Reef (MCR) LTER(link is external) are among the 28 sites around the world where long-term research is yielding significant insights(link is external).
“Distinguishing climate change effects arising from an increase in the frequency of abrupt events and gradual directional changes requires a long-term perspective,” said Dan Reed(link is external), a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute and one of the founders of the SBC LTER. “Research at LTER sites is well poised to investigate both of these types of climate change phenomena because it combines long-term observational data to document patterns of spatial and temporal change with experiments, and targeted sampling to identify the biological and physiochemical mechanisms producing the observed changes.”
Among the information collected at the LTER sites are data on changes in air and water temperature, rainfall, sea level, novel disturbances, altered primary production, enhanced cycling of organic and inorganic matter and changes in the populations and communities.
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
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