Arctic LTER Site Description: General Information.

The Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research (ARC-LTER) project is one of 24 LTER projects in North America, Puerto Rico, and Antarctica. The Arctic LTER's field research site is based at University of Alaska's Toolik Field Station, Alaska, in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range (68° 38'N, 149° 43'W, elevation 760 m).  The foothills are characterized by continuous permafrost, no trees, 24 hour sunlight during short cool summers, periods of complete darkness during long cold winters (graph) and numerous pristine lakes and streams. Tussock tundra is the dominant vegetation but there are extensive areas of wet sedge tundra, drier heath tundra on ridge tops and other well-drained sites as well as areas of river-bottom willow communities.

The year-round base of the Arctic LTER project is at the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.  The Director of the Arctic LTER is John Hobbie while Gus Shaver, Bruce Peterson, John O'Brien, and George Kling form an executive committee and direct the tundra, streams, lakes, and landscape interactions sections, respectively. (Arctic LTER personnel)

The goal of the Arctic LTER project is to predict the future ecological characteristics of the site based upon our knowledge of the controls of ecosystem structure and function as exerted by physical and geologic factors, climatic factors, biotic factors, and the changes in fluxes of water and materials from land to water.  To achieve this goal the Arctic LTER uses several approaches:

Long-term monitoring and surveys of natural variation of ecosystem characteristics in space and time. Includes: climate, plant communities and productivity, thaw depth, stream flow, chemistry of streams and lakes, temperatures of streams and lakes, lake chlorophyll lake productivity, zooplankton abundance. 

 

 

Experimental manipulation of ecosystems for years and decades. Includes: tundra warming, shading, and fertilizing, grazer exclusions, fertilization of lakes and streams, addition and subtraction of predators. 

Synthesis of results and predictive modeling at ecosystem and watershed scales. Includes: stream N cycling, lake physics, bioenergetics of fish populations, water movement and transfer of DOC and nutrients from land to water, soil respiration, cycling and storage of C in tundra under different scenarios of future climates.