ESIIL team members, Kai Kopecky and Ty Tuff, are part of a new LTER synthesis group. Their proposal, Life after death: how legacies of dead foundation species influence ecological processes across marine and terrestrial ecosystems (Material legacy effects), was selected as one of three new Scientific Peers Advancing Research Collaborations (SPARC) synthesis groups who will meet in person at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for one week, starting this fall. 

Their new LTER SPARC working group aims to generalize the effects of material legacies across a wide range of ecosystems by characterizing different types of material legacies and their effects on their living counterparts. 

Their proposal identifies eleven different material legacies at LTER sites spanning from Alaska to French Polynesia, with experts from each site that contributed data. By pulling together this working group, they are able to bring together system-specific expertise to probe their data for general responses across these systems. In the end, they hope to develop a predictive framework for these legacies to make accurate and reliable predictions about how these legacies will influence ecosystems.