Long-Term Ecological Research at the Kellogg Biological Station LTER Site - The Ecology of Agricultural Landscapes - page 25

from MCSE sites to local fields (e.g., Gelfand et al. 2011); local watersheds (e.g.,
Hamilton 2015, Chapter 11 in this volume); southwest Michigan (e.g., Rudy et al.
2008); the state of Michigan (e.g., Ma et al. 2012); the Great Lakes states (e.g.,
Landis et al. 2008); and the U.S. Midwest (e.g., Grace et al. 2011, Gelfand et al.
2013), as dictated by the questions under investigation.
How large a landscape might KBS LTER research represent? Michigan is among
the 12 states that produce most of the nation's corn, and is thus included in the
USDA's designated North Central Region, part of which is known as the U.S. Corn
Belt. Corn Belt states include Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota,
Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Though
there are many caveats, KBS LTER research has been extended to the North Central
Region by biogeochemical modeling used to forecast potential soil carbon seques-
tration (Fig. 1.10; Grace et al. 2006) and N 2 O fluxes (Grace et al. 2011), as well
as by crop modeling to develop regional crop stress indicators (Gage et al. 2015,
Chapter 4 in this volume). Another, more robust approach to extend KBS LTER
research findings would be to establish cooperative agricultural sites within the
region at which coordinated experiments and observations might be conducted
(Robertson et al. 2008a), similar in power to the many cross-site LTER syntheses
now in the literature (Johnson et al. 2010). The nascent Long-Term Agricultural
Figure 1.10 . Potential soil carbon sequestration expected on adoption of no-till manage-
ment in the USDA's North Central Region. Predicted values are modeled by the SOCRATES
soil organic carbon model (Grace et al. 2006).