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Jornada Basin LTER
Jornada Basin LTER
John Anderson, site manager, and Dara Parker, field technician, re-set weather station data at the Jornada Basin Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program site.
Located in the northern Chihuahuan Desert, approximately 25 kilometers northeast of Las Cruces, N.M., (+32.5 N, -106.8 W, elevation 1188 meters), the Jornada Basin is part of the LTER Network, a collaborative effort involving more than 1800 scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales. The network promotes synthesis and comparative research across sites and ecosystems and among other related national and international research programs. The National Science Foundation established the LTER program in 1980 to support research on long-term ecological phenomena in the United States.
The Jornada Basin LTER, in collaboration with the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Jornada Experimental Range, studies the causes and consequences of desertification--the broad scale expansion of woody plants into grasslands that results in more "desert like" conditions. The Jornada Basin program is interested in spatial and temporal variation in desertification dynamics, and how historic legacies, the geomorphic template, transport vectors (wind, water, animals), and environmental drivers (climate, land use, disturbance) interact with the patch structure of the vegetation to determine past, present and future ecosystem dynamics across scales. [Research supported by NSF grant DEB 06-18210.] (Date of Image: 2004)
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