2018 LTER All Scientists' Meeting

Although hundreds of short-term local experiments indicate that random changes in biodiversity can cause substantial changes in primary productivity, it remains unclear whether these influences of biodiversity are weaker or stronger at larger scales in natural ecosystems. Our synthesis working group is developing and testing strategies for scaling-up results from biodiversity experiments and inferring causality from observations. In this workshop, we will provide an update on progress to date, share a new method for quantifying insurance effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning, and present approaches for causal inference in observational data. We seek to identify new collaborators and data from LTER sites.