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Research Overview
The Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Site is part of the national LTER Network established by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1980. The Network is made up of 26 sites at which long-term research in ecology and environmental biology provides a better understanding of ecological phenomena in both natural and managed ecosystems. A broad variety of ecosystems are represented in the Network, including tundra, forest, grassland, desert, wetland, and urban sites. KBS joined the network in 1988 to represent the agricultural or row-crop ecosystem.
Research at the KBS LTER site is directed towards understanding ecological interactions underlying the productivity of both annual and perennial field crops. These include corn, soybean, and wheat rotations as well as forage crops such as alfalfa and biofuel crops such as poplars and native successional communities. Contrasts with natural forest and old field (successional) sites provide important points of comparison for gauging the effects of intensive management on the ecology of organisms in modern field crop ecosystems.
Research at KBS asks how diverse plants, animals, and microbes in agricultural landscapes can contribute to farm productivity, environmental performance, and profitability. One of the organizing questions of the KBS LTER Project centers on the role of biodiversity in agriculture, and in particular on the functional significance of diversity with respect to ecosystem function. Agronomic management typically reduces the structural complexity of various biotic communities within the crop ecosystem. This raises several key questions:
- what are the key features of the row-crop ecosystem that regulate biotic complexity
- what -- if any -- are the ecosystem-level consequences of a reduction in complexity, and
- to what extent can we manage complexity to lessen the need for expensive inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.
One of the goals of KBS LTER research is to address questions related to this biotic simplification, i.e. to the patterns, causes, and consequences of changes in community complexity as a function of row crop ecosystem management. We focus on three major taxonomic groups of central importance to row-crop ecosystem function: soil microbial and soil invertebrate communities affect organic matter dynamics and biogeochemical processes critical to crop growth; communities of aboveground consumers - pathogens and insects operating at several different trophic levels - that can severely affect primary productivity in outbreak years; and plant communities, which largely drive nutrient dynamics and both belowground and insect community structure. The consequences of changes in complexity will be expressed at the ecosystem level as changes in primary productivity and nutrient cycling. more....