Extreme Drought in Grassland Ecosystems (EDGE) Net Primary Production Quadrat Data at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico

EDGE is located at six grassland sites that encompass a range of ecosystems in the Central US - from desert grasslands to short-, mixed-, and tallgrass prairie. We envision EDGE as a research platform that will not only advance our understanding of patterns and mechanisms of ecosystem sensitivity to climate change, but also will benefit the broader scientific community. Identical infrastructure for manipulating growing season precipitation will be deployed at all sites. Within the relatively large treatment plots (36 m2), we will measure with comparable methods, a broad spectrum of ecological responses particularly related to the interaction between carbon fluxes (NPP, soil respiration) and species response traits, as well as environmental parameters that are critical for the integrated experiment-modeling framework, as well as for site-based analyses. By designing EDGE as a research platform open to the broader scientific community, with subplots in all replicates (n = 180 plots) set-aside for additional studies, and by making data available to the broader ecological community EDGE will have value beyond what we envision here.