Collections Id: 46

Resource Count: 62

We are currently working in four areas in cooperation with other Jornada, USGS and university scientists: arid-land ecosystem dynamics, restoration ecology, the development of inventory, assessment and monitoring protocols, and the development of strategies to increase the relevance of science to societal outcomes. Our research on ecosystem dynamics is designed to increase our ability to stratify land based on its resilience in response to multiple stressors (including roads and off-highway vehicles activity) and to identify key processes and feedbacks associated with resilience. This work is in collaboration with the DoD, USGS, LTER, and BLM. Our restoration work in cooperation with scientists at New Mexico State University focuses on modifying the distribution of water at multiple spatial scales, and on developing new strategies for using natural processes to disperse seeds to maximize the probability of establishment. Our inventory, assessment and monitoring research addresses relationships between indicators and ecosystem services and functions, cost-effective statistical designs for multi-scale inventory and monitoring, the repeatability of different methods, the integration of field-based and remote sensing techniques, and the development of automated data entry systems, databases and decision support systems. This work is in cooperation with agencies and organizations throughout the world including Mexico, Honduras, Mongolia, and China. We are also cooperating with the NRCS and National Park Service to develop sampling protocols for dynamic soil properties. We are working in cooperation with ARIDnet on an NSF-funded Research Cooperation Network to integrate biophysical and socioeconomic knowledge to address linked social and environmental challenges in the Americas, and with the Ecological Society of America and other organizations on the development of an Ecological Knowledge System.