LTER: From Microbes to Macrosystems: Understanding the response of ecological systems to global change drivers and their interactions

30年来，哈佛森林长期生态研究（LTER）项目一直致力于了解新英格兰的森林。这个项目的核心是一群科学家和学生，他们做实验，测量森林随时间变化的多种方式。他们对森林与社会的联系特别感兴趣。在接下来的六年里，他们将研究森林如何应对气候变化、入侵物种的扩散以及人类对土地的利用。科学家们将开始一些新的研究，并继续进行其他研究，所有这些研究都将揭示森林如何以及为什么随着时间的推移而变化。许多研究都是与自然资源专业人士合作设计的，以确保它们有助于解决现实世界的问题。科学家将指导来自不同背景的大学生，他们将在跨学科的团队中一起工作。学生们将学习新的技能并收集重要的数据。公立学校的教师和学生也将通过哈佛森林的活动参与进来。来自永久森林样地网络的数据将继续记录森林特征的长期变化，并为三个涡流通量塔、多个遥感观测和一个综合建模框架提供验证点。这个网络将由一个新的土壤生态样地系统和一个35公顷的茎图森林动态样地来加强。总的来说，基于情节的研究将用于描述跨空间和时间尺度的初级生产、组成和结构的驱动因素。为了了解观测到的气候和大气化学趋势的后果，LTER计划将继续支持一套长期运行的土壤变暖和慢性氮添加实验。此外，基于湖芯花粉和树木年轮分析的古生态学研究将与模拟模型相结合，以检验与气候对森林的长期影响有关的假设。研究人员将在他们20年的研究历史的基础上，通过观察地下微生物群落的变化，河流生物化学，以及基于30年Landsat时间序列的铁杉损失的区域模式，研究由入侵昆虫引起的铁杉减少。了解入侵昆虫后果的研究将扩展到新到来的翠绿灰螟和舞毒蛾的重新出现。哈佛森林继续保持着一些世界上关于人类土地利用对森林生态系统影响的权威研究，涵盖了殖民农业的持久遗产到现代土地利用制度。土地利用影响的LTER研究将扩展到新英格兰地区，利用不同的遥感平台、森林清查数据库和空间模型，了解土地利用的时空格局如何影响森林动态。最后，LTER项目将继续支持区域模拟框架的开发，以预测全球变化驱动因素对新英格兰景观的个体和相互影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

For thirty years the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has been dedicated to understanding New England's forests. The heart of the program is a group of scientists and students who do experiments and measure the many ways that forests change over time. They are especially interested in how forests are linked to society. In the next six years they will study how forests respond to changes in climate, the spread of invasive species, and use of land by humans. Scientists will start some new studies and continue others, all connected by what they'll reveal about how and why forests change over time. Many of the studies have been designed in partnership with natural resource professionals to ensure that they help solve real-world problems. Scientists will mentor college students from many backgrounds, who will work together in interdisciplinary teams. The students will learn new skills and collect important data. Public school teachers and students in their classrooms will also be engaged through activities at Harvard Forest. Data from a network of permanent forest plots will continue to document long-term changes in forest characteristics and provide validation sites for three eddy-flux towers, multiple remote sensing observations, and an integrated modeling framework. This network will be augmented by a new system of soil ecology plots and a 35-hectare stem-mapped forest dynamics plot. Collectively, the plot-based studies will be used to describe the drivers of primary production, composition, and structure across broad scales of space and time. To understand the consequences of observed trends in climate and atmospheric chemistry, the LTER program will continue to support a long-running suite of soil warming and chronic nitrogen addition experiments. In addition, paleoecological studies, based on analysis of pollen in lake cores and of tree rings, will be coupled to simulation models to test hypotheses related to the long-term influence of climate on forests. The researchers will build upon their 20-year history of studying hemlock-decline due to an invasive insect by including observations of the changes in belowground microbial communities, stream biochemistry, and the regional pattern of hemlock loss based on a 30-year Landsat time-series. Studies to understand the consequences of invasive insects will be expanded to the newly arrived emerald ash borer and the reemergence of gypsy moth. The Harvard Forest continues to maintain some of the world's canonical studies of human land-use impacts on forest ecosystems, spanning the persistent legacies of colonial agriculture to the modern land-use regime. LTER studies of land-use impacts will be expanded to the scale of New England, using diverse remote sensing platforms, forest inventory databases, and spatial modeling, to understand how the spatio-temporal patterns of land use affects forest dynamics. Finally, the LTER program will continue to support the development of a regional simulation framework that projects the individual and interactive effects of global change drivers on the New England landscape.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.