Completed in 2024, the precipitation manipulation research area at Harvard Forest was designed to mimic extreme precipitation events affecting temperate forests subject to fragmentation. Encompassing a mature forest edge within Harvard Forest’s Prospect Hill tract, nearly one acre of impermeable cover intercepts roughly 90% of precipitation so that it does not reach the forest floor. Excess precipitation is collected and flows through an automated watering system that increases precipitation by roughly 90% on an adjacent one-acre plot. The experimental plot and an adjacent control plot include both interior and “edge” forests, or those that are adjacent to non-forested land.
Designed in response to prior limitations imposed by studies that only examined interior forest carbon sequestration, this experimental area allows research between the interactive effects of forest fragmentation and climate on tree growth and forest carbon sequestration.
This project, also known as the Climate Interactions with Forest Fragmentation (CLIFF) Project, was initiated in 2022 by Andrew Reinmann, a visiting researcher whose home institutions are The Advanced Science Research Center and Hunter College, both at The City University of New York. Since its inception, various collaborators such as those in Dartmouth’s Tumber-Dávila Lab have begun utilizing the experiment’s infrastructure to examine a variety of research questions.