Working Together: Effective Collaboration in a Consortium Environment

This paper describes innovative library services to distance students negotiated through a geographically dispersed consortium, the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL). The Distance Education Forum (DE Forum) is one of the most active member groups within COPPUL, and has had a number of successes in collaborative services over the years. This paper provides an overview of how the DE Forum works, its Web site, and its ways of working through small sub-teams coordinated via an annual meeting. We describe a number of projects, looking both at what was successful and what didn’t work as well, and discuss what we learned

Pushing precipitation to the extremes in distributed experiments: recommendations for simulating wet and dry years

Intensification of the global hydrological cycle, ranging from larger individual precipitation events to more extreme multiyear droughts, has the potential to cause widespread alterations in ecosystem structure and function. With evidence that the incidence of extreme precipitation years (defined statistically from historical precipitation records) is increasing, there is a clear need to identify ecosystems that are most vulnerable to these changes and understand why some ecosystems are more sensitive to extremes than others. To date, opportunistic studies of naturally occurring extreme precipitation years, combined with results from a relatively small number of experiments, have provided limited mechanistic understanding of differences in ecosystem sensitivity, suggesting that new approaches are needed. Coordinated distributed experiments (CDEs) arrayed across multiple ecosystem types and focused on water can enhance our understanding of differential ecosystem sensitivity to precipitation extremes, but there are many design challenges to overcome (e.g., cost, comparability, standardization). Here, we evaluate contemporary experimental approaches for manipulating precipitation under field conditions to inform the design of ‘Drought-Net’, a relatively low-cost CDE that simulates extreme precipitation years. A common method for imposing both dry and wet years is to alter each ambient precipitation event. We endorse this approach for imposing extreme precipitation years because it simultaneously alters other precipitation characteristics (i.e., event size) consistent with natural precipitation patterns. However, we do not advocate applying identical treatment levels at all sites – a common approach to standardization in CDEs. This is because precipitation variability varies >fivefold globally resulting in a wide range of ecosystem-specific thresholds for defining extreme precipitation years. For CDEs focused on precipitation extremes, treatments should be based on each site's past climatic characteristics. This approach, though not often used by ecologists, allows ecological responses to be directly compared across disparate ecosystems and climates, facilitating process-level understanding of ecosystem sensitivity to precipitation extremes.Fil: Knapp, Alan K.. State University of Colorado - Fort Collins; Estados UnidosFil: Avolio, Meghan L.. National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center; Estados UnidosFil: Beier, Claus. Norwegian Institute for Water Research; NoruegaFil: Carroll, Charles J. W.. State University of Colorado - Fort Collins; Estados UnidosFil: Collins, Scott L.. University of New Mexico; Estados UnidosFil: Dukes, Jeffrey S.. Purdue University; Estados UnidosFil: Fraser, Lauchlan H.. Thompson Rivers University; CanadáFil: Griffin Nolan, Robert J.. State University of Colorado - Fort Collins; Estados UnidosFil: Hoover, David L.. Southwest Biological Science Center; Estados UnidosFil: Jentsch, Anke. University of Bayreuth; AlemaniaFil: Loik, Michael E.. University of California; Estados UnidosFil: Phillips, Richard P.. Indiana University; Estados UnidosFil: Post, Alison K.. State University of Colorado - Fort Collins; Estados UnidosFil: Sala, Osvaldo Esteban. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisiológicas y Ecológicas Vinculadas a la Agricultura. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía. ; Argentina. Arizona State University; Estados UnidosFil: Slette, Ingrid J.. State University of Colorado - Fort Collins; Estados UnidosFil: Yahdjian, María Laura. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisiológicas y Ecológicas Vinculadas a la Agricultura. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía. ; ArgentinaFil: Smith, Melinda D.. State University of Colorado - Fort Collins; Estados Unido