Investigators:
- Ashley Bulseco
- Abigail Borgmeier
- Francis Chaves Rodriguez
- McKinley Nevins
- Smriti Pehim Limbu
Are above- and belowground ecological communities synchronous or decoupled in response to temperature and precipitation variability?
Multiple studies have identified relationships between climate variability and aboveground communities. However, belowground commmunities are often ignored when examining he impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Our purpose is to examine if above- and belowground communities respond synchronously to temperature and precipitation variability in different ecosystems.
- Find data sets focused on plant (aboveground) and soil microbial communities (belowground) across different ecosystems focused particularly on forest, grassland, desert, coastal and tundra.
- Identify an appropriate measurement of coupling, coupling being defined as a community property of above- and belowground components of an ecosystem having the same trayectory at a given time.
- Communiy properties that we intent to evaluate: richness, evenness, diversity, dominance, biomass.
- Response: primary productivity measured as biomass.
- Systems that experience more long-term variability exhibit greater degrees of decoupling.
- Systems that experience more extremes compared with the long-term climate variability exhibit lower degree of coupling of above- and belowground communities.
- More comprehensive understanding of the responses of ecosystems to climate variability and extremes.
- Identify a knowledge gap in monitoring of belowround communities.
Briefly describe the purpose of each script (or folder of scripts) here as you create them! This is still in progress.
When you have a group of people collaborating on a shared project (particularly a code-heavy one), it can be nice to create some guidelines to make sure everyone is contributing in consistent ways. Similarly if your group reaches consensus on a 'style' of file names and/or code it can be good to formalize those rules as well. The standard convention in GitHub is to create a file called "CONTRIBUTING.md" that contains all of this information. If you want some inspiration check out the LTER Scientific Computing team's CONTRIBUTING.md document!
LTER Scientific Computing Team website & NCEAS' Resources for Working Groups