Legacy ecological data from the northern plains: Adding historical context to NEON data

Background/Question/Methods

Ecological data commonly grow more valuable with age. Such legacy data provide baseline records of past biological, physical, and social information needed to set conditions of today in historical perspective and recognize stasis or change. The objective of this project was to summarize and catalog legacy data collected during 1963-1989 at Woodworth Study Area (WSA), a contiguous block of grasslands and wetlands covering over 1000 hectares of the prairie pothole region of North Dakota. WSA is one of the longest-researched grassland sites in the Upper Midwest. It is also the core site for the northern plains domain of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), which is scheduled to begin 30 years of data collection across the continent in 2017. WSA legacy data include long-term vegetation transects, flowering phenology, land use, habitat management, geologic information, wetland hydrology and chemistry, spatial images, and history of the people occupying the land. Most of these data have not been previously reported or summarized. We used published methods of data management and archiving to synthesize and summarize archived WSA data and match it with future NEON data products.

Results/Conclusions

Here we summarize the existing WSA datasets and give a general orientation to the WSA site. We found at least 30 NEON data products that could be supplemented with existing WSA legacy data. These include categories of vegetation, imagery, physical measurements, and water chemistry. In addition, WSA has extensive recorded history of settlement, land use, and management that provides a deeper context for current research and which could be useful to social ecologists. The archived data are valuable independent of NEON as well. WSA is representative of many other lands purchased by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the prairie pothole region from the 1930s to the 1970s. Therefore, synthesized data from WSA apply broadly to topics of concern in northern grasslands, such as increases in non-native plants, managing for biodiversity, and long-term effects of habitat management. The implications for ecology are that the NSF-funded NEON data can be used in a historical context and in many cases analyzed alongside similar data already collected from WSA. This will double the length of certain datasets and more completely leverage others.