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GCE attends inaugural DRAGNET meeting
The DRAGNet program (Disturbance and Resources Across Global Grasslands) held its inaugural meeting in Minnesota in July. DRAGNet has around 60 sites, including GCE, that are implementing a common experiment in which we add nutrients and disturb the soil in different treatments. The goal is to explore why different results are found at different sites, and in this way to gain a better understanding of how plant communities work. The network is run by Elizabeth Borer, who is on the GCE Advisory Committee.
Steve and Kalpana attended this first meeting. The group discussed about six potential papers that the network could start with. One focuses on biomass responses across the board, another on whether native and invasive species respond differently, another on how different functional groups respond, another on responses of diversity and beta diversity, and so on.
A highlight of the meeting was the fact that the data set was organized and cleaned before we walked in the door, so that we could spend our time doing analyses instead of trying to clean up a messy data set. Having a standard experimental protocol at all sites also makes the synthesis process much easier.
The inaugural DRAGNet meeting in 2024
(Contact Steve Pennings for additional information)
submitted Aug 05, 2024
