Climate warming in polar regions is associated with thawing of permafrost, resulting in significant changes in soil hydrology, biogeochemical cycling, and in the activity and composition of soil communities. While ongoing, directional climate warming can elicit such responses over decadal time scales, their manifestation typically occurs as discrete thawing pulses. Indeed, in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica abrupt changes in community structure and biogeochemical cycling in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems following a summer warming event (Jan.
Dataset Results
Basic Layers from the MCM-LTER spatial data holdings have been exported and symbolized, and they are available for download here. Most of these layers date from Oct-2007 or earlier, please see the Polar GeoSpatial Center for more updated base and specialized layers.
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We use metacommunity simulations to understand how local and regional community assembly dynamics influence the regional biodiversity patterns that we observe in the McMurdo Dry Valleys ecosystem. A metacommunity refers to a network of communities in an ecosystem that are connected to one another by the dispersal of biota among sites. For example, ponds in the McMurdo Dry Valleys share common diatom species that are likely dispersed among neighboring ponds by wind.
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Climate warming in polar regions is associated with thawing of permafrost, resulting in significant changes in soil hydrology, biogeochemical cycling, and in the activity and composition of soil communities. While ongoing directional climate warming presses can elicit such responses over decadal time scales, their manifestation typically occurs as discrete thawing pulses. Indeed, in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, abrupt changes in community structure and biogeochemical cycling in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems following a summer warming event (Jan.