The University of California - Berkeley and the University of Nevada Desert Research Institute are awarded grants to install a network of monitoring stations across the University of California Natural Reserve System (NRS). This collaboration joins two centers of disciplinary expertise to complement and extend their respective missions. The NRS sites have a long history of observations and research on the dynamics of ecological function and structure. The UC NRS contribution to this monitoring effort is to act as long term hosts of the measurement sites, assist in site identification and deployment, and oversee continued operation of the sites. The NOAA Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC) at Desert Research Institute has extensive experience with climate observations, and with supplying data to users in forms they need and prefer. The contribution of the Desert Research Institute / Western Regional Climate Center (DRI/WRCC) is to identify specific locations, prepare and install the sensing platforms, set up communications, and provide for data ingestion, archival, dissemination, and display.
Climate is a significant and pervasive influence on biota, and it is not possible to understand observed ecosystem behavior without accounting for the varying role of environmental drivers. The combination of a) high quality environmental data and b) information on the trends in abundance of plants and animals at sites across a geographic range of California, and for long periods of time at each site, can transform our understanding of the interaction between the physical environment and individual species and ecological communities as they evolve in time. Much stronger inferences can be made about relations between variations in climate and distribution of animals and plants if both observations are made simultaneously and in close proximity. Uniformity in observational practices and equipment across the climate observing network will transform the ability of a larger group of researchers to link their ecological observations to the shared climate data and explore entirely new scales of ecology-climate interactions at within-reserve and between-reserve spatial and temporal scales.
