Milchunas, Daniel G.2007-01-032007-01-031997-2004http://hdl.handle.net/10217/83326http://dx.doi.org/10.25675/10217/83326The Short Grass Steppe site encompasses a large portion of the Colorado Piedmont Section of the western Great Plains. The extent is defined as the boundaries of the Central Plains Experimental Range (CPER). The CPER has a single ownership and landuse (livestock grazing). The PNG is characterized by a mosaic of ownership and land use. Ownership includes federal, state or private and land use consists of livestock grazing or row-crops. There are NGO conservation groups that exert influence over the area, particularly on federal lands.Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL)Shortgrass Steppe-Long Term Ecological Research (SGS-LTER)This data package was produced by researchers working on the Shortgrass Steppe Long Term Ecological Research (SGS-LTER) Project, administered at Colorado State University. Long-term datasets and background information (proposals, reports, photographs, etc.) on the SGS-LTER project are contained in a comprehensive project collection within the Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/10217/100254). The data table and associated metadata document, which is generated in Ecological Metadata Language, may be available through other repositories serving the ecological research community and represent components of the larger SGS-LTER project collection. Most investigators studying grasslands have assumed that the low standing biomass of the SGS created a system with a low probability of carrying fire, and thus a minimal historical role of fire. Nonetheless, there are years with aboveground biomass equivalent to the mixed grass prairie, and a high frequency of lightening storms. Regardless of the historical role of fire in SGS, there are new questions regarding its utility in managing for the presence of the threatened mountain plover, which only nests in areas of low plant biomass. United States Forest Service, Pawnee National Grassland recently initiated a burning program in the mid 1990s to address questions about using fire to increase plover habitat; we have collected data on some of these plots to investigate the influence of fire on SGS vegetation. Several datasets were created between 1999 and 2004 by SGS-LTER researchers, including measurements of shrub and cactus mortality rates, aboveground net primary production, amounts of litter and standing dead, and aboveground nitrogen dynamics in burned and control plots in the western section of the Pawnee National Grassland.ZIPPDFTXTXMLengData sets were provided by the Shortgrass Steppe Long Term Ecological Research (SGS-LTER) Program, a partnership between Colorado State University, United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, and the U.S. Forest Service Pawnee National Grassland. Significant funding for these data was provided by the National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Research program (NSF Grant Number DEB-1027319). The SGS-LTER project (1980-2014) was established as one of the first sites in the US LTER Network and has produce a rich legacy of digital materials including reports, proposals, images, and data packages. Data, products and other information produced from the SGS-LTER are curated as a collection within the Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/10217/100254). Materials can be accessed from the Institutional Digital Repository of Colorado State University or upon request by emailing ecodata_nrel@colostate.edu. All data are open for dissemination and re-use for any purpose, but you must attribute credit to the owner and cite use appropriately according to the LTER Data Access Policy (http://www.lternet.edu/policies/data-access).fire ecologyprimary productionaboveground net primary productivitydisturbanceDataset