Long-Term Soil Ecosystem Studies

The evolution of this website owes much to one individual, Michael Hofmockel, but it also owes much to the annual Duke University graduate class, Env 321, "Advanced Readings in Soil-Ecosystem Science", and to the collaboration of Prof. Pete Smith (Univ. Aberdeen) and his SOMNET and EuroSOMNET projects that gathered soil C data from LTSEs worldwide.

The website was given birth in Fall 2004 by Duke University's graduate class, Env 321, with graduate students from Duke, NCSU, and UNC. The class contacted long-term study sites, read and critiqued literature, and laid the foundations for the website by identifying and contacting LTSEs on all continents. The website benefited greatly from the large-scale SOMNET and EuroSOMNET metadata (Smith et al. 1997, Smith et al. 2000).

In the Spring 2006, the Env 321 class (with Duke and UNC students) took field trips and examined LTSEs in the field and forest, at Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory, Calhoun Experimental Forest, and NCSU's Center for Environmental Farming Systems.

During the summer of 2006, NSF funded the LTSE project to broaden its purview to include space-for-time studies, and linking it to NSF's young but growing program that explores the Earth's Critical Zone (Wilding and Lin 2006; Brantley et al. 2006).

During the Spring and Summer of 2007, Env 321 continued to build the inventory of the world's long-term soil-ecosystem experiments, now with over 160 studies, as well as help initiate the first NSF workshop networking LTSEs, scheduled to be held in December 2007.

Dan Richter