Site News

Coweeta Completes Major Facilities Improvement and Expansion

Brian Kloeppel
Coweeta LTER

Over the past two years, three major building projects have been completed that further support research collaboration and education at Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory. The facility improvements resulted from cost-shared funding from the USDA Forest Service, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Georgia.

Improved and expanded: The Coweeta Conference Center. Photo: Brian Kloeppel

The Analytical Laboratory was remodeled and expanded and was completed in February 2002. The lab now includes additional bench space, a walk-in drying oven and cold room, and state-of-the-art safety features. The 5200 ft2 (483 m2) lab generates on average 63,000 chemical determinations per year for both experimental and long-term ecological monitoring projects.

The Coweeta Residence was remodeled and expanded and was completed in August 2003. The Residence—originally the Coweeta Administrative Office built in 1937—has seen several expansions in its 67 years, but its historic exterior stone and wood architecture has been maintained. The interior has been completely updated and includes space for 20 visiting researchers—including bedrooms, kitchens, restrooms, utility areas, a social room, computers, and full internet connections via a T-1 line. The social room was named in honor of the late Dr. Tom Callahan, formerly of NSF, for his many contributions towards science and education at LTER research sites. A plaque honoring Tom was presented to his wife, Anne, and son, James, at a Coweeta Facility Open House in October 2003.
A new Conference Center was completed in October 2003 with several related components to be completed in 2004. The Conference Center includes indoor and outdoor meeting areas and eight offices with supporting facilities (see photo). The 6400 ft2 (595 m2) center is designed for both formal and informal meetings. The 80-person conference room can be arranged for a variety of purposes and the living room with its large fireplace and the large hallways provide areas for informal networking. The center’s outside walls are mostly floor-to-ceiling windows that provide a panoramic view of Coweeta’s natural setting.

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Jornada Helps BLM to Answer Land Management Questions

A unique collaboration between researchers from the Jornada Basin LTER, the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) personnel is tackling ecological problems in the western United States and attracting the attention of policy makers.

In June 2004, the BLM director, Dr. Kathleen Clarke, invited Jornada researchers and collaborating local BLM staff to the Bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters to brief BLM staff, who were developing new national assessment strategies, on their collaborative activities.

Rangeland Specialists from the Bureau of Land Management Las Cruces Field Office evaluating soil/landform relationships of an assessment site in order to match the site to its state-and-transition model. Photo: Brandon Bestelmeyer

BLM oversees about 105 million hectares of land in 12 western states of the USA. Increasingly, these states are interested in carrying out comprehensive assessments of the health of the nation’s public deserts, grasslands, shrublands, and woodlands. Questions that engage them include how standards for public lands health can be identified, how deviations from this standard can be measured and interpreted, and how millions of hectares of land can be examined efficiently.

In response, BLM sought scientific guidance to translate the policies resulting from this renewed interest in ecological questions into practice. The collaboration has resulted in several direct applications of Jornada LTER scientific findings, such as state-and-transition models describing nonlinear vegetation responses to disturbance on particular soils (described in Bestelmeyer et al., 2003; 2004), process-based indicators that allow managers to infer the nature of vegetation change based on snapshot or short-duration monitoring (Pyke et al., 2002), and remote-sensing approaches that link state-and-transition models and indicators as well as simulation models to broad-scale patterns (Peters and Herrick, 2001).