STEVE CAMPBELL
DECATUR, Texas — What was once Dust Bowl farmland in North Texas is poised to be on the front line of one of the nation's largest ecological projects.
Over 30 years, the rolling prairies and woodlands of the Caddo-LBJ National Grasslands will serve as part of a living, changing laboratory in the first-ever continental ecological observatory.
The National Ecological Observatory Network is designed to increase understanding and forecasting of the effects of climate change, biodiversity, land-use changes, invasive species, pollution and other issues, said Dr. Michael Keller, chief scientist of the Boulder, Colo.-based nonprofit organization.
The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, an independent agency that directs federal funding for research.
Last week, the foundation approved the network's final design review, a major planning hurdle for the project, said Jennifer Walton, the network's public relations manager.
Since 2007, the network has received $27 million in federal money, she said. Next up: final approval of future funding this summer by the foundation board and director, before heading to Congress for its blessing, Walton said.
"We're very optimistic," Keller said.
The network's staff of about 65 people is expected to double during the construction phase in 2011, then increase to about 250 when the project is fully operational in 2016.
The project is geared toward understanding how "big-scale forces" are changing the country's ecosystem, Keller said.
"Our ecosystems are changing; they are doing so in response to some really important big-scale forces, and those are the change in climate, the change in how we are using the land and the change in how species are distributed over our national territory," he said.
"It's about understanding how those forces are then changing the way ecosystems function. And we are interested in how ecosystems function because we live off the products of ecosystems, whether it be wood from forests or food from farms or fresh water," Keller said.
The grasslands' core site will be part of a connected network of 20 eco-climatic domains that represent regions of vegetation, landforms and climate across the country, Keller said. Other domain locations include the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, the Appalachians, western Massachusetts, northern Wisconsin and the U.S.-Mexico border.
At each domain, the ecology will be measured using sensor instrumentation, satellite orbiters, a specially equipped airplane, and samples of plants, animals, insects, soil and water collected by hand, he said.
That data will be supplemented with information from other sources, such as National Weather Service stations and historical archives.
Each domain will employ about six people and host two mobile-deployment systems with the same array of sensors as the core site, Keller said.
The strategy is to stay nimble and be adaptive to new research needs, he said.
But it's not all high-tech.
"Our observations will include human observers. The biggest source of data collection will be people," Keller said.
The biologically diverse Caddo-LBJ National Grasslands is a patchwork of federal lands that share boundaries with everything from ranches and trophy homes to a junkyard.
Its name belies the nature of the landscape, District Ranger Jim Crooks said.
"People think of the terrain in Dances With Wolves, but we are 60 percent forest," said Crooks, who manages the U.S. Forest Service property from Decatur, about 40 miles northwest of Fort Worth.
It's not a pristine wilderness by any stretch of the imagination, with a maze of roads and 73 drilling sites within its borders.
But with 20,250 acres in the LBJ Grasslands in Wise County and 17,785 acres in the Caddo unit west of Paris, the site "was a perfect fit" for the network's needs for the Southern Plains Domain, Crooks said.
"This is a real rich area for diversity. We've got nearly 1,400 known plant species just here in the LBJ Grasslands, and there's probably only about 2,000 native species in Texas," Crooks said. "Two hours east of here, you are in deciduous forest and two hours west of here you are in the Great Plains, and we're a wedge right in the middle of it."
The federal acquisition of the grasslands started in the late 1930s, when the government started buying worn-out Dust Bowl farms.
But when World War II started, efforts to consolidate the holdings ended, he said. The U.S. Forest Service acquired the land in the 1960s and has focused on restoration of native plants, Crooks said.
Only about 600 acres remain in a native state. "It was too steep to farm, and that protected it," Crooks said.
Controlled fire is the primary tool for returning the land to its native character, he said.
"What we are seeing is that native plants are coming back after our prescribed burns," Crooks said. "Mother Nature is a lot smarter and better than us at restoring these prairies."
Bob O'Kennon, vice chairman of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas in Fort Worth, has been studying plant life in the grasslands for 10 years and has discovered three plant species there.
"It's a phenomenal place," O'Kennon said. "We are so lucky that NEON is going to put the site right here."
The Southern Plains domain encompasses most of Texas and Oklahoma and small parts of Arkansas and Kansas.
The network also considered a site in the Texas Hill Country and another near the King Ranch in South Texas, said Steve Hallgren, a professor of forest ecology at Oklahoma State University.
The possibility of a new highway complicated the Hill Country site, and private ownership made the South Texas site problematic, he said.
"Access is critical," Hallgren said. "You need infrastructure like power and roads for the core site." Even more important, he said, is a commitment to access and protection for 30 years that federal land allows.
Dave Sire, a Washington-based Forest Service planner coordinating with the foundation and the 10 forest units that will serve as core sites, said agency researchers are excited about the network.
"This is going to provide a lot of valuable long-term ecological data," Sire said.
A hallmark of the project is that all of the data will be standardized, he said. "The 30-year lifespan of the study will give us something that hasn't been easy to obtain in the past."
The grasslands location between forested areas to the east and plains to the west makes it an ideal "transition zone," Hallgren said.
"Another advantage I saw is that it's close to Dallas-Fort Worth, and it's going to show what happens in land-use changes," he said. "Now we have a core site that over the next 30 years is going to see itself surrounded by development.
"One could argue it should be out in wild lands where that will never happen," Hallgren said. "Well, that is not very representative of the United States."
The project will be a unique resource for scientists, land managers and academia, Crooks said.
"There's a lot of interest from area universities; Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, UNT and TCU," he said. "Researchers from around the region are having a meeting next month for Domain 11, where scientists and researchers get together to start focusing on where they want to lead the research."
The network will help integrate science across the U.S.
"You've got universities scattered around the region who might be working on similar things but don't know it," he said. "Once they tap into this base resource, there will be a lot more coordination."
It will also be a rich opportunity for students.
"It's really exciting," O'Kennon said. "We are going to put a lot of TCU students to work on this."
Eventually, "citizen scientists" will play a role, too, Hallgren said. "It will be a while, but NEON will need lots of volunteers on the ground."
And they will all help forecast the ecological future, Keller said.
The data will be used to create understanding of ecological systems, "and build models of those systems so we can forecast — predict the future — on how they will work," he said.
The information will be available to anyone who wants "to come and get it," Keller said.
"We're not just a science organization; we're an education organization. Our education goal is to make the citizens of the country more ecologically literate," he said.
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