NUT01 Nutrient Network: Investigating the roles of nutrient availability and vertebrate herbivory on grassland structure and function at Konza Prairie

The goals and focal research questions are copied below from the Nutrient Network website. More information can be found at nutnet.org. NutNet focal research questions: (1) How general is our current understanding of productivity-diversity relationships? (2) To what extent are plant production and diversity co-limited by multiple nutrients in herbacoues-dominated communities? (3) Under what conditions do grazers or fertilization control plant biomass, diversity, and composition? NutNet goals: (1) To collect data from a broad range of sites in a consistent manner to allow direct comparisons of environment-productivity-diversity relationships among systems around the world. This is currently occurring at each site in the network and, when these data are compiled, will allow us to provide new insights into several important, unanswered questions in ecology. (2) To implement a cross-site experiment requiring only nominal investment of time and resources by each investigator, but quantifying community and ecosystem responses in a wide range of herbaceous-dominated ecosystems (i.e., desert grasslands to arctic tundra).