Directory

Start date:
Mid December 2009
End date:
Late January 2010
Locations:
Lake Hoare, (Crary Lab), F6, Lake Fryxell
Principle Investigator:
Diana Wall
Organisation:
Colorado State University
State
Colorado
Field season overview:
Field team members will make day trips by helicopter from McMurdo Station to study sites in the Taylor, Wright and Victoria Valleys. They may also make multi-day trips to established field camps in Taylor Valley. The researchers will monitor long-term experimental plots and collect soil samples to look for relationships between biodiversity and carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles; and they will study the phylogeny of soil fauna (nematodes, tardigrades, and rotifers). The field team will set up processing and soil and sediment sampling operations in the Crary Lab. Some samples will be shipped to the home institution for further analysis.
B424: The Role of Resource Legacy on Contemporary Linkages Between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Processes in a Cold Desert Ecosystem: The McMurdo Dry Valley LTER Program
The McMurdo Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) projects will continue to investigate the McMurdo Dry Valleys as an end-member ecosystem and focus on the relative roles of legacy and extant processes on current biodiversity and ecosystem structure and function. This project continues a long-term study of the impact of climate and other global changes on the abundance, distribution, and diversity of soil biota in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Researchers maintain, monitor, and sample soils in various long-term experimental plots throughout Taylor Valley, in collaboration with Ross Virginia's group (B-423). These experiments reveal relationships between biodiversity and Dry Valley carbon, nitrogen, and hydrologic cycles.