The Need to Establish a Long-Term Ecological Research Network in Morocco as a Tool to Monitor Ecosystems Under Climate Change

Several countries are associated with the long-term ecological research (LTER) program, while others are in the process of joining the network. In Morocco, there is an urgent need to be a member of this network because the diversity of challenges associated with the various ecosystems requires multidisciplinary long-term studies. The chapter discusses this need by assessing the environmental vulnerability of Morocco basing on data from the environmental vulnerability index profile. Ecosystem change and vulnerability were investigated at the sites within the LTER program by exploring the criteria of the selected sites. The driving forces, pressures, states, impacts, responses framework would be a useful approach to study and explain the ecological changes of each selected site. The chapter highlights the purpose, significance, the mission, objectives, and the international cooperation of the proposed LTER network called Mo-LTER.

Structure and Functionality of the Mesozooplankton Community in a Coastal Marine Environment: Portofino Marine Protected Area (Liguria)

This research is part of the LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) project, a network of terrestrial, freshwater, transitional water and marine sites, on which ecological research is conducted on a multi-decade scale. LTER studies ecosystems, their dynamics and evolution, the relationships between biodiversity and ecological functionality, water quality, productivity, the role of resource availability, the effects of pollution and climate change. The research focuses on the study of the variability of zooplankton groups in the Portofino marine protected area, in Punta Faro. The samplings were carried out in the years 2018–2019, and the results were compared with the values of the years 2003–2005, interesting from a meteorological climatic and biological point of view. The plankton community of the Punta Faro system was analyzed by means of a modeling approach to obtain information on the functionality and health status of the system and to verify whether this has undergone any alterations in the last decade. The analyses carried out show a clear difference between the three-year period 2003–2005 and the two-year period 2018–2019, highlighting how environmental changes, such as the increase in temperature, have led to higher costs of system functioning in the last two years. The mesozooplankton community has changed both in terms of abundance of organisms and in terms of organization and functionality.

A Multi-Year Assessment of Phytoplankton Fluorescence in a Large Temperate River Reveals the Importance of Scale-Dependent Temporal Patterns Associated With Temperature and Other Physicochemical Variables

An integrated temporal study of a long-term ecological research and monitoring database of the St. Lawrence River was carried out. A long and mostly uninterrupted high temporal resolution record of fluorometric data from 2014 to 2018 was used to examine phytoplankton fluorometric variables at several scales and to identify temporal patterns and their main environmental drivers. Sets of temporal eigenvectors were used as modulating variables in a multiscale codependence analysis to relate the fluorometric variables and various environmental variables at different temporal scales. Fluorometric patterns of phytoplankton biomass in the St. Lawrence River are characterized by large, yearly-scale patterns driven by seasonal changes in water temperature, and to a lesser extent water discharge, over which finer-scale temporal patterns related to colored dissolved organic matter and weather variables can be discerned at shorter time scales. The results suggest that such an approach to characterize phytoplankton biomass in large rivers may be useful for processing large data sets from remote sensing efforts for detecting subtle large-scale changes in water quality due to land use practices and climate change.

Phytoplankton Dynamics and Water Quality in the Venice Lagoon

We analyzed the phytoplankton abundance and community structure monthly over a 20-year period (1998–2017) at five stations in the Venice lagoon (VL), one of the sites belonging to the Long-Term Ecological Research network of Italy (LTER-Italy). We focused on phytoplankton seasonal patterns, inter-annual variability and long-term trends in relation to water quality. Diatoms numerically dominated (ca. 60% on average), followed by nanoflagellates (37%), while coccolithophorids and dinoflagellates contributed less than 2%. We observed distinct seasonal and inter-annual changes in the abundance and floristic composition of the phytoplankton groups, whilst no clear long-term trend was statistically significant. We also assessed the water quality changes, applying to our dataset the multimetric phytoplankton index (MPI), recently officially adopted by Italy to accomplish the water framework directive (WFD) requirements. The index evidenced a temporal improvement of the water quality from “moderate” to “good” and allowed us to confirm its reliability to address the changes in the water quality, not only spatially—as previously known—but also for following the yearly time trends. Overall, our results highlight the importance of long-term observations, for understanding the variability in the phytoplankton communities of the lagoon as well as the relevance of their use to test and apply synthetic descriptors of water quality, in compliance with the environmental directives.

Mountain Watch: How LT(S)ER Is Safeguarding Southern Africa’s People and Biodiversity for a Sustainable Mountain Future

Southern Africa is an exceptionally diverse region with an ancient geologic and climatic history. Its mountains are located in the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes at a tropical–temperate interface, offering a rare opportunity to contextualise and frame our research from an austral perspective to balance the global narrative around sustainable mountain futures for people and biodiversity. Limited Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) was initiated more than a century ago in South Africa to optimise catchment management through sound water policy. The South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) has resurrected many government LTER programmes and added observatories representative of the country’s heterogeneous zonobiomes, including its mountain regions. LTER in other Southern African mountains is largely absent. The current rollout of the Expanded Freshwater and Terrestrial Environmental Observation Network (EFTEON) and the Southern African chapters of international programmes such as the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA), RangeX, and the Global Soil Biodiversity Observation Network (Soil BON), as well as the expansion of the Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN), is ushering in a renaissance period of global change research in the region, which takes greater cognisance of its social context. This diversity of initiatives will generate a more robust knowledge base from which to draw conclusions about how to better safeguard the well-being of people and biodiversity in the region and help balance livelihoods and environmental sustainability in our complex, third-world socio-ecological mountain systems.

ecocomDP: A data design pattern and R package to facilitate FAIR biodiversity data for ecological synthesis

Two programs that provide high-quality long-term ecological data, the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), have recently teamed up with data users interested in synthesizing biodiversity data, such as ecological synthesis working groups supported by the US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Office, to make their data more Findable, Interoperable, Accessible, and Reusable (FAIR). To this end: we have developed a flexible intermediate data design pattern for ecological community data (L1 formatted data in Fig. 1, see Fig. 2 for design details) called "ecocomDP" (O'Brien et al. 2021), and we provide tools to work with data packages in which this design pattern has been implemented. we have developed a flexible intermediate data design pattern for ecological community data (L1 formatted data in Fig. 1, see Fig. 2 for design details) called "ecocomDP" (O'Brien et al. 2021), and we provide tools to work with data packages in which this design pattern has been implemented. The ecocomDP format provides a data pattern commonly used for reporting community level data, such as repeated observations of species-level measures of biomass, abundance, percent cover, or density across multiple locations. The ecocomDP library for R includes tools to search for data packages, download or import data packages into an R (programming language) session in a standard format, and visualization tools for data exploration steps that are recommended for data users prior to any cross-study synthesis work. To date, EDI has created 70 ecocomDP data packages derived from their holdings, which include data from the US Long Term Ecological Research (US LTER) program, Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program, and other projects, which are now discoverable and accessible using the ecocomDP library. Similarly, NEON data products for 12 taxonomic groups are discoverable using the ecocomDP search tool. Input from data users provided guidance for the ecocomDP developers in mapping the NEON data products to the ecocomDP format to facilitate interoperability with the ecocomDP data packages available from the EDI repository. The standardized data design pattern allows common data visualizations across data packages, and has the potential to facilitate the development of new tools and workflows for biodiversity synthesis. The broader impacts of this collaboration are intended to lower the barriers for researchers in ecology and the environmental sciences to access and work with long-term biodiversity data and provide a hub around which data providers and data users can develop best practices that will build a diverse and inclusive community of practice.