The Boston-Area Climate Experiment (BACE)
Investigator(s)
Principal investigator:
Jeffrey Dukes, Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA
E-mail: jeffrey.dukes(at)umb.edu
Abstract
To date, experimental studies of climate change have focused on temperature or precipitation, but rarely both. Additionally, warming studies, with one exception, have focused on the effects of a single step increase in temperature. It is not known whether most ecosystem and community variables respond unimodally, linearly or otherwise to temperature increases, or how these responses would be affected by accompanying changes in precipitation. The Boston-Area Climate Experiment (BACE) is designed to address this issue. The BACE, which is currently under construction, is a field experiment with a factorial combination of precipitation and temperature manipulations. The BACE will take place in old fields at the Waltham Educational Center (within 10 miles of Boston; formerly the Agricultural Experiment Station), allowing unusual public access to an experiment of this type. Extensive public education displays are being constructed around the project. The experiment is expected to run for at least four years following the initial year of infrastructure construction. Funding began in spring 2006. Unlike previous experiments, the BACE will have four different temperature treatments and three precipitation treatments, enabling tests of the hypotheses that species- and ecosystem-level responses to warming are parabolic, and that the character of these responses depends strongly on precipitation.
URL
For more details please see: here
