Dr. Debra Peters has spent over 20 years studying changes across 15 study sites in the Jornada Basin, which take an immense amount of effort to monitor three times a year. Field technicians fan out across the landscape, measuring the volume of plant line and estimating new growth, a process that takes weeks for each of the three annual measurement cycles. The goal? To gather enough information to characterize the five ecosystem types that exist in this area, an endeavor that had never before been undertaken.

Read the entire blog at the LTER Network site!