Konza LTER Small Mammals
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Overview:
The Konza Long-term Ecological Research site (LTER) is located on a 3,847 ha tall-grass prairie reserve in Kansas. Konza LTER is divided into experimental watersheds, where each watershed is subjected to a combination of different fire and grazing intensities. Long-term monitoring of small mammal communities has been conducted on a subset of these watersheds (approximately 20) since 1981.
Ecological Level: Community
Habitat: Grassland
Location: Kansas (Lat/Long)
Spatial Scale of data: 20 different watersheds, 2 permanent trapping transects in each watershed. Each transect consists of 20 stations spaced 15 m apart
Timespan: 1981-1997
Frequency: 2-3 times anually. Trapping has been regularly conducted in Spring and Autumn. Trapping was also conducted in summer, but was discontinued after 1987.
Observational/Experimental: Observational on the experimental watersheds
Dataset Location:
Data collection summary: During each sampling period, each transect within a watershed is trapped for 4 consecutive nights. Sherman live traps were placed at each station. The only data avilable through the LTER is summaries of species abundance for each transect.
Data Collected: Species, abundance
Issues:
- As with the Konza birds, there are some issues with watershed names being changed. n01d, which was trapped in 1981 and 1982 was merged into the watershed n01b. Documentation seems to indicate that the traplines were not moved and thus data from n01d can be combined with n01b.
- Upper and lower case are used indescriminately for the same watershed code, trapline ID, and season. If your database management tool is case-sensitive, you should clean those up.
- Time series considerations:
- only some watersheds are trapped consistently over the years. Using Using Rehmeier et al (2005) the long-term sites are: 000b,001d,004b,004f,n00b, n01b, n04d. All have 17 years of data except for n00b, which has 16 (data from 1981 are missing?). n01b technically has 15, but has 17 if you combine n01d with n01b (there is no evidence that the trap line placement changed).
- Since only 1 trapping session in 1981, for comparability either only use autumn trapping or drop 1981.