NSF Renews Fray Jorge LTREB

NSF Renews Fray Jorge Project, Extending a 35+ Year Ecological Experiment

In a dry coastal forest in north-central Chile, fences built decades ago still shape who lives and dies in the circle of life.

Inside some plots, small mammals—rodents like degus—move freely as they are pursued by hawks, owls, and foxes. In others, both prey and their predators are kept out. Over time, those differences have cascaded throughout the ecosystem, reshaping plant communities, altering food webs, and changing how organisms respond to climatic variability.

For more than 35 years, researchers have returned to these experimental plots at Fray Jorge. It has been maintained as one of the longest-running ecological experiments in the world. Now, with renewed support from the US National Science Foundation, our most recent efforts enter their second half of a coordinated 10-year research plan. A defining feature of the work happening this decade is the incorporation of genomic technologies to understand how the ecosystem is assembled—and the consequences of its disassembly under global change.

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​A Desert Experiment, 35+ Years Running, Enters a New Phase

​What began as an elegant set of field manipulations has become one of the world's best established platforms for understanding how ecosystems actually work.

Over the past five years, our team has been busy building the capacity to combine long-term ecological data from the plots—routine monitoring of plants, small mammals, and predators--with genomic tools capable of detecting interactions that are otherwise impossible to see. We are building toward a comprehensive answer to one of the most classic questions in ecology: who eats whom?

The renewal of our NSF Long-term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) award marks an exciting new phase of the effort. We have set the foundation and now we are turning our attention to major synthesis.

From field experiment to integrative platform

​The next five years will focus on connecting processes that are often studied in isolation: how food webs change with climatic variability; the foraging behaviors of predators and prey; population dynamics in response to resource pulses. 

The opportunity to connect these dots and achieve this kind of synthesis underscores how much long-term experiments matter in ecology. Short-term studies capture moments in history, but long-term experiments reveal trajectories that can redefine ecosystems.

Because the experiment at Fray Jorge has been maintained for more than 35 years, it is possible to distinguish lasting ecological change from short-term fluctuation—to see which patterns persist, which dissipate, and which cascade across entire communities.

Incorporating dietary DNA metabarcoding approaches transforms the kinds of questions that we can finally answer. Knowing exactly what kinds of foods animals eat—both predators and prey—enables us to connect long-term trajectories to underlying biological mechanisms.

Results emerging in this second half of our decadal plan have the potential to extend insights from our single, intensively studied system into a far broader understanding of dryland ecosystem dynamics. Stay tuned.