Hi Eco-loggers, Recently, the NSF Research Coordination Network funded “Drought-Net: A global network to assess terrestrial ecosystem sensitivity to drought” (http://www.drought-net.org <http://www.drought-net.org/>). The goal of this network is to advance our understanding of terrestrial ecosystems responses to drought. To broaden participation in this network and leverage existing precipitation manipulation experiments, DroughtNet has planned a core network activity named “Enhancing Existing Experiments (EEE)”.
The rationale for EEE is that, while there are numerous precipitation manipulation experiments, our network will take the next step forward by coordinating new standardized measurements across a range of ongoing experiments. We envision existing experiments as a network-scale platform that can be leveraged to advance our understanding of ecological responses to precipitation change. Recruiting researchers to participate in network-level studies is central to the success of EEE. Once interested researchers are identified, participants will take advantage of existing experiments in a highly coordinated fashion. This may involve innovative syntheses of existing data from ongoing and past experiments as well as new research activities. The latter will focus on designing innovative network-level studies within existing experiments - with an emphasis on standardized sampling across experiments to maximize data comparability and provide new insight into the mechanistic basis of differential ecosystem sensitivity to alterations in precipitation. To begin planning for EEE activities, we are compiling a database of ongoing precipitation experiments as well as gauging researcher’s interest in participating in EEE. The brief survey below is designed to do both. You access the survey here: http://vcae.polldaddy.com/s/precipitation-augmentation-database <http://vcae.polldaddy.com/s/precipitation-augmentation-database> Thanks, Nathan Lemoine Postdoctoral Researcher Colorado State University Department of Biology www.natelemoine.com <http://www.natelemoine.com/>
