This year marks the first year of data collection for the fully built out National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) presenting the beginning of an unprecedented opportunity to harness ecological data collected with standardized protocols across large spatial and ultimately temporal scales. As this endeavor begins and data streams become available, it is important to recognize that lasting ecological legacies may result from a site’s disturbance history, whether the disturbances be natural or anthropogenic. For instance, in the eastern United States modern forests present at sites today, such as the Harvard Forest (HARV the core site of NEON’s northeast domain), have species compositions that reflect human land-use over the past 250 years. Although early planning of NEON recognized the importance of reconstructing the disturbance history of sites, budgetary cuts during build out of the network led to the lack of data collection on this important ecological driver. To fill this data gap, our research group is quantifying disturbance and land-use history from the plot to the domain scale. This presentation will focus on our efforts to quantify site-level disturbance history with initial work being done at co-located Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network and NEON sites to leverage the rich history of land-use provided by the LTER network.
Results/Conclusions
We found that NEON organismal plots spanned a variety of past land-uses at sites. For instance, at HARV NEON’s organismal plots span a range of different logging histories. At Ordway Swisher Biological Station (OSBS) plots fall on areas with varied prescribed burn histories and are currently managed on different burn frequencies. These differences in disturbances influenced variation in biodiversity across sites. We found that, after accounting for land cover type, plot-scale plant species richness at both Toolik (TOOK) and HARV was positively related to proximity to anthropogenic features such as roads, pipelines, walls, and building foundations (p<0.05), as well as being positively related to fire frequency at OSBS (p=0.11). These results support the need for finer resolution (<30m) past land use data to explain variation in organismal diversity at NEON sampling locations. Our results provide compelling evidence that the lack of more detailed past land-use and disturbance regime data at NEON sites limits NEON-enabled science and the potential for NEON data to inform policy. We are developing a reproducible workflow for spatially aligning past land-use data with NEON organismal data using R, QGIS, and GitHub for all NEON sites.