About Konza LTER

The Konza Prairie LTER Program is a comprehensive and a multidisciplinary program designed to address long-term research questions relevant to tallgrass prairie ecosystems, and the science of ecology in general. The Konza Prairie LTER program also offers eductaion and training opportunities for students at all levels, contributes knowledge to address land-use and management issues in grasslands, and provides infrastructure and data in support of scientific pursuits across a broad range of disciplines.

Konza Prairie LTER was one of the 6 original LTER sites, and pre-LTER research extends selected datasets back >40 years. The Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), a 3487-hectare area of native tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of northeastern Kansas, is the primary site for most of this research. Since 1981, the broadly based Konza Prairie LTER research program has encompassed studies from the organismic through population, community, ecosystem and landscape ecology levels. These studies are linked via an overarching theme that includes the major abiotic and biotic factors influencing this ecosystem. Our central hypothesis is that fire, grazing and climatic variability are essential and interactive factors responsible for the structure and function of tallgrass prairie.

In contrast to many other grasslands where ecological processes are constrained by chronic limitations of a single resource (e.g., water), organismic to ecosystem processes and dynamics in tallgrass prairie are products of spatial and temporal variability in multiple limiting resources (water, light, N). Variability in, and switching among, these primary limiting resource(s) are caused by both extant and historical fire, grazing and climatic regimes. Moreover, responses to these factors are strongly dependent on topographic and landscape position. As a result of this complexity, and because grazing and fire regimes are managed in grassland systems worldwide, data from the Konza Prairie LTER program have relevance not only for understanding grasslands, but for broader ecological issues such as stability-diversity questions and interactions among land-use, biodiversity and climate change.

NSF's LTER Program

The National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program began funding research in 1981 after a series of workshops and planning meetings in the late 1970s. The value of, and need for, long-term ecological studies had been recognized for many years by ecologists. Rationale for development of the LTER programincluded explicit recognition of the low rate of change of many significant ecological processes, the importance and prevalence in most ecosystems of rare events and episodic phenomena with long return intervals, the tremendous interannual variability of many ecological processes, and the value of long-term databases for providing the context for shorter term studies. The LTER program was designed to support a multidisciplinary approach to addressing long-term questions in a wide variety of biomes in North America and beyond. Both site-based and coordinated research among the network of LTER sites are enhancing our understanding of ecological phenomena and processes operating over broad spatial scales, as well as long-time scales.

LTER Core Areas

All LTER sites conduct research in 5 general "core" areas established at the start of the LTER program. These core areas focus on understanding and documenting (1) patterns and controls of primary production, (2) spatial and temporal dynamics of key populations, (3) patterns and controls of organic matter accumulation in surface layers and sediments, (4) patterns of inorganic input and movements through soils, groundwater, and surface water, and (5) patterns and frequency of disturbances to the system. Within the broad areas, sites are free to focus on the biota processes most relevant to their specific site. For example, LTER research at Konza Prairie focuses on fire, grazing and climatic variability as essential, interactive drivers of ecological processes in mesic grassland ecosystems.