Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research Program

PIs: Jennifer Rudgers, Marcy Litvak, Seth Newsome, Kim Eichhorst

Year-to-year differences in climate make drylands among the most variable ecosystems on Earth. The fluctuating nature of drylands makes them excellent study systems to improve general understanding of the biological consequences of environmental variability. The Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program expands knowledge of the biological processes in drylands, guided by the question: How do long-term trends of climate variability drive the dynamics of dryland ecosystems and transitions among them? Knowledge of the biological consequences of climate variability has been limited because its effects play out over longer time periods than most scientific studies, making long-term support critical to advancing this scientific frontier. Forecasting the future of drylands requires determining the combined impacts of more variable rainfall and rising temperature trends, both of which are predicted under climate change. These changes may have the greatest effect at the borders between dryland ecosystem types. We study transitions among five major dryland ecosystems in North America (pinon-juniper woodlands, juniper savannas, Plains grasslands, and Chihuahuan Desert grasslands and shrublands) that converge at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico. Our focus on transitions puts the effort where the action is for understanding major, future changes in dryland ecosystem function and services. The Sevilleta LTER program develops new theory to predict the consequences of environmental variability over space, time, and scales of biological organization, and generates the long-term data needed to test these new predictions.