Lotic Intersite Nitrogen eXperiment (LINX) II, following the success of the original LINX, starts in PR in January. LINX II is a study of small stream N dynamics with changes in land use, using additions of 15N-NO3. The experiments will be conducted on 9 streams in and around the Luquillo LTER over 3 years and will include forested, agricultural, and urbanized streams. Comparisons will be made with identical short-term 15N-NO3 additions in streams in 7 other biomes in the US. We are actively seeking collaborators who might like to piggyback off the planned experiments. Jody Potter will be heading up the project (as a staff member in McDowell's lab and as a graduate student) with the assistance of Jeff Merriam and Bill McDowell. Please contact Jody or McD if you would like to find out more or might like to work with us on the project.
The NASA-EPSCoR project out of Mayaguez is coordinating an overflight of the
island by the ATLAS sensor from January 12-21. The Airborne Thermal and Land
Applications Sensor (ATLAS) from NASA/Stennis operates in the visual and IR
bands. It flies on a Lear 23 jet for flexibility and produces high resolution
images of value to observe Urban Heat Island effects. Ground truthing needed
includes met and radiometer data. I have requested that the flight lines be
extended over Luquillo, and I would like to ask if any of you are willing to
provide met data or do some radiometer measurements on the day of the overflight.
In addition, I am preparing my contribution for the next two years of the NASA-EPSCoR
project. I would like to suggest examining the gradient of heat island effects
from San Juan to El Yunque to look for changes in local weather patterns using
the RAMS model. I would like to tie this to LTER LULC work and I'm looking for
collaborators.
We have added another met station data to the LTER Network Information Management (NIS) Climdb data set. We published this on October 30, 2003 with the scientific guidelines from Alonso Ramírez and the data-entry job done by our pre-med student, Jelexza Vélez, who we hired last September using the last LTER supplemental Grant.
The data that we used to populate this Climdb data base is the Meteorological data from El Verde Datalogger. Our Catalog corresponding ID for this data set is LTERDBAS Rec. No. 127. Our local version of the data is located at: http://luq.lternet.edu/data/lterdb127/metadata/lterdb127.html
Climdb has a specific list of parameters that it can manipulate; hence we only
populated a subset of parameters into this database. The parameters populated
into Climdb are (all daily):
Global Radiation (in Mega Joules/m2, Air Temperature Max, Min, and Mean (in
Centigrade), Mean Relative Humidity (percent), Wind Speed (in meters/seconds),
Mean Wind Direction (degrees), Precipitation (in mm).
The data base is reachable at: http://www.fsl.orst.edu/climhy/climdb/
It provides the user with a Web search engine that allow them to select the parameter and the time period they want to get the data from. The user can either visualize the data on a chart and or download it in different formats (e.g., ASCII comma-delimited, tab delimited).
Next step is to have the Bisley Tower data populated into the Climdb. That
will be the third Climdb station along with the 8 Hydrological Stations that
the systems harvest automatically from the USGS Web server (see http://www.fsl.orst.edu/climhy/hydrodb/).
Post Hurricane recovery of a herbacious understorey plant in a tropical rain forest in Puerto Rico. 2003. E. Melendez-Ackerman, C. Calisto, M. Morales-Vargas, J. Fumero Pagan. Journal of Tropical Ecology 19:677-684.