This is the first volume in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Series. Established in 1980, the LTER program is exploring a wide variety of biomes characteristic of the United States and developing a baseline for ecosystem dynamics over long time periods and broad spatial scales. The volumes in this series will include both comprehensive reviews of research from particular sites and topical overviews which use data from many sites to examine important questions in ecology. This volume, which focuses on the Konza Prairie in northeastern Kansas, is a synthesis of over 15...

This book will provide a complete overview of an alpine ecosystem, based on the long-term research conducted at the Niwot Ridge LTER. There is, at present, no general book on alpine ecology. The alpine ecosystem features conditions near the limits of biological existence, and is a useful laboratory for asking more general ecological questions, because it offers large environmental change over relatively short distances. Factors such as macroclimate, microclimate, soil conditions, biota, and various biological factors change on differing scales, allowing insight into the relative contributions...

Biodiversity in Drylands, the first internationally based synthesis volume in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Series, unifies the concepts of species and landscape diversity with respect to deserts. Within this framework, the book treats several emerging themes, among them:

- how animal biodiversity can be supported in deserts
- diversity's relation to habitat structure, environmental variability, and species interactions
- the relation between spatial scale and diversity
- how to use a landscape simulation model to understand diversity
- microbial...

This volume in the Long-Term Ecological Research Network Series would present the work that has been done and the understanding and database that have been developed by work on climate change done at all the LTER sites. Global climate change is a central issue facing the world, which is being worked on by a very large number of scientists across a wide range of fields. The LTER sites hold some of the best available data measuring long term impacts and changes in the environment, and the research done at these sites has not previously been made widely available to the broader climate change...

This site-synthesis volume presents 20 years of work at the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Research Site. It provides the definitive information base for the ecology of temperate lakes, and a general assessment of the role of lakes within their landscapes. The Wisconsin temperate lakes LTER site has had a major role in the growth of our modern limonological understanding, and this book also chronicles the history of this work. The book should be of interest to most American limonologists and a significant number of general ecologists.