The Konza Prairie LTER Program: Grassland Dynamics and Long-Term Trajectories of Change

The Konza Prairie LTER program (KNZ) is a comprehensive ecological research, education and outreach program, centered on one of the most productive grasslands in North America – the tallgrass prairie. Our focal research site is the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), 3487 ha of native tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of NE Kansas. The Konza Prairie LTER program was one of the first site-based LTER programs funded by the National Science Foundation in 1980.  Our long-term datasets (many that span >30 yrs) address key ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, primary productivity, and population and community dynamics of plants and consumers. These long-term records provide unique insights into the dynamics and functioning of tallgrass prairie ecosystems, and serve as a critical baseline for identifying and interpreting ecological responses to environmental change.

Since its inception, the Konza LTER program has focused on fire, grazing and climatic variability as three critical and interactive drivers that affect ecological pattern and process in grasslands worldwide. Our LTER research is facilitated by a site-based, watershed-level experimental design that includes a range of prescribed fire and grazing treatments, and a network of intensively monitored streams.  This watershed-level design is complemented with long- and short-term plot-level and stream-reach experiments. Our research encompasses studies across multiple levels of biological organization (organismic, population, community and ecosystem) and a broad range of spatial (plot-level, watersheds, regional landscapes) and temporal (days to decades) scales. In total, these studies address the major abiotic drivers (climate and fire) as well as numerous biotic interactions (herbivory, competition, mutualism, and predation) that shape grassland communities and ecosystems. Our current LTER research builds upon a legacy of these long-term studies to address the influence of multiple global change phenomena (changes in land-use and land cover, climate and hydrologic change, nutrient enrichment, biological invasions) and the effectiveness of grassland restoration on the sustainability and dynamics of grassland ecosystems worldwide, and to contribute to the advancement of ecology through synthesis and integration of data from short- and long-term studies.