LTER: Advancing ecological understanding of drylands through integrated research at the Jornada Basin (JRN-8)

About This Grant

The Jornada Basin (JRN) long-term research team will study why and how grasslands in low rainfall areas are shifting to shrub and bare ground in the southwestern United States and beyond. Losing grassland ecosystems can negatively affect human well-being by reducing livestock production and increasing soil erosion. It also changes how important elements, like carbon and nitrogen, flow through these ecosystems with consequences for carbon storage and water quality. This project aims to further advance understanding of this shift to shrublands by studying (1) how weather and land management affect the shift, (2) what happens to the flow of carbon and other elements, (3) how wind and water erosion could speed up the change in some cases, or even reverse it in others, and (4) how microbes, plants, animals and their interactions influence how fast the loss of grassland happens. Along with the planned research, the team will continue to expand successful K-12 education programs that reach thousands of students and teachers annually through field trips, classroom visits, public events, teacher trainings, and internships. The team will also continue to work with land managers, in collaborations with USDA and other partners, to provide information and data about land health and build capacity for evidence-based decision making in the face of environmental change. This renewal of the JRN LTER project will be organized around the site’s new Pulse-Interaction-Reserve-Feedback-Change framework for understanding state changes in dryland ecosystems. This framework integrates consideration of temporal and spatial variability and alternative stable states to explain and predict changes in grassland habitats. The research team will measure primary production, carbon and inorganic nutrient cycles, and plant-animal interactions in response to changing rainfall, temperature, and land disturbances through observations and experiments. Novel modeling activities will examine hydrologic connectivity and leverage machine learning and long-term data to advance understanding of ecosystem state change. Results from this site and others show drylands are critical components of Earth’s biogeochemical cycles and atmospheric gas concentrations. Long-term data and empirical insights derived from JRN research are expected to inform regional to global scale models and syntheses. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.