Fantastic news at the Jornada! We were given official notice from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that the Jornada LTER will be funded for an additional four years. Congratulations to all our dedicated researchers and staff for their excellent research and for their efforts on the proposal.
Continuously funded since 1982, the Jornada LTER was established to understand and quantify the key factors and processes controlling ecosystem dynamics in Chihuahuan Desert landscapes. Our research focuses on themes of desertification, grass recovery, shrub-state transitions, novel ecosystems, landscape integration, and global change. The overall goals of the current research proposal are to develop robust principles of dryland state transitions and to apply them across spatially heterogeneous landscapes to forecast future states in response to changing climate and land use. The Jornada LTER 2020-2024 proposal will be posted in the coming days.