Youngmeyer Ranch, KS Environmental Data (AIMS_GP_YMR)

Environmental data from AIMS research locations at Youngmeyer Ranch, Kansas. Full description in 'Metadata' tab of excel data file.

Youngmeyer Ranch is located in Elk County, KS (outlet location: 37.56442, -96.49106) and managed by Witchita State University and owned by the Youngmeyer Trust. The ranch is roughly 1902 ha of grassland prairie used predominantly for cattle grazing and is burned every 1-2 years. A tributary of the Elk River, specifically the south branch of the Elk River headwaters, elevation at Youngmeyer ranges from 373-488 m with mean annual temperature of 13.7°C and mean annual precipitation of 979mm. This site is geologically constructed of Permian age limestone and shale with layers of chert below silty clay loam soils (Houseman et al. 2016). This site is predominantly grassland composed of the same dominant grasses as Konza Prairie, with scattered black oaks (Q. veluntina) along the creeks (Houseman et al. 2016).

Houseman, G. R., M. S. Kraushar, and C. M. Rogers. 2016. The Wichita State University biological field station: Bringing breadth to research along the precipitation gradient in Kansas. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 119(1):27-32.

Further information for all data fields can be found in the \"Data Types\" tab of this file. In short, this resource contains data for sites across a suite of sensor types, denoted by the sublocation field. These sublocations include:
- \"SW\" -- a site where regular surface water sampling occurred, and contained a stilling well to record stream water level

This resource was created using geospatial analyses using publicly available topographic data (Digital Elevation Models, DEMs from the USGS National Map Downloader v2.0; https://apps.nationalmap.gov/downloader/).
Site locations GPS coordinates were collected using a eMLID Reach RX multi-band RTK rover.
Elevation was extracted from a DEM. All additional environmental data were derived from this DEM using whitebox functions for topographic and stream network analysis (Wu & Brown, 2022) in R version 4.4.0 (R Core Team, 2024).

Approach 1 site is outlet site, with a STIC, pressure transducer loggers, and YSI EXO and S::CAN
Approach 2 sites long term monitoring, equipped with pressure transducers and STICs
Additional sites with STICs