The annual meeting is to be held January 16 (open date) & 17 (LTER researchers only). The program is attached.
The Discovery Channel has shot a large segment for their four part series on Energy at Luquillo last month. Griselle Gonzales and Charlie Hall were filmed for many hours discussing what energy is and how it runs many things in the Luquillo Forest (e.g. climate, Hadley cells, water cycle, photosynthesis, food chains, nutrient cycles, the economy below). We tried to emphasize the cooperation of the Forest Service and individual investigators, and the importance of long term research.
Then Oscar Abelleira and Nancy Harris demonstrated at Bisely how one would measure photosynthesis and respiration (energy capture and use) in the forest canopy with Oscar's super slingshot, Nancy's rope climbing skills and our LiCor 6400. A huge downpour almost crashed our shooting, but fortunately it stopped (but not before the camera man and sound man went nuts trying to capture the effects). Of course it was all staged and the cameraman shot from the tower! But it should look great.
Charlie was impressed with the quality of the questions they asked him to respond to and the general professionalism of the team... as well as the tremendous support from many people in the Forest Service (Thank you!). Of course we do not get to edit the final and they do, so we will report later how we think they handled it. But they showed no concern when we discussed potentially controversial subjects such as peak oil and population.... quite the opposite.
Next they are planning to take Charlie for a helicopter ride over Alberta Tar sands. The series is supposedly showing this summer.
On November 20-22, we hosted 19 high school students and 4 teachers from our 4 schoolyard LTER high schools for the 3rd Schoolyard LTER Internship at El Verde. The students conducted field work in three areas: water quality, soil, and dbh.
A workshop on information management was held using the Hydrology data as the hands-on resource which exposed the students and teachers to the complete process unique and typical to managing LTER data: documenting (using LUQ LTER metadata standards) and designing the data base, entering the data into the data base, conducting quality control processes, managing the data to make charts and analysis, preparing power points presentations, publishing data on the web, and presenting the results to the group and two visiting LUQ researchers on the last day. The web page, which includes metadata, data gathered at the Internship (as well as data gathered at the previous Internships) and the students' presentations can be found at:
http://luq.lternet.edu/outreach/schoolyard/Activities/2009Internship/2009Internship2.html
In addition, each school was given 10 litter bags to conduct a cross-schoolyard site decomposition study. The schools will now conduct research at their schoolyard site and present the results of their research in the spring at UPR. A new feature this year is the addition of the fellows from the new GK12 program. Four of the GK12 fellows will each be mentoring one of the high schools. We will be showing a documentary of the institute at the annual meeting.
"Flooding gradient and treefall gap interactive effects on plant community structure, richness, and alpha diversity in the Peruvian Amazon". This is my fourth Amazon paper. It will be published in Ecotropica.
Happy Holidays!
Compiled by Jody Potter, University of New Hamshire (Jody.Potter@unh.edu)
Web-published by Eda C. Meléndez-Colom (emelendez@lternet.edu)
December 15, 2009