NutNet Guidelines for Participation

Purpose

1. To implement a replicated cross-site experiment requiring only nominal investment of time and resources by each investigator, and quantifying community and ecosystem responses in a wide range of herbaceous-dominated ecosystems.
2. To collect data from a broad range of sites in a consistent manner to allow direct comparisons of environment-productivity-diversity relationships among systems around the world.
    

General Rules for Participation

NutNet is a flexible, inclusive network of researchers who agree to:

1. Fund project infrastructure and implementation at their own site(s)
2. Implement the core data collection and experimental protocols
3. Share data associated with the project in the central NutNet database 

Site establishment and data collection

All participating sites must follow the experimental protocol and use the available templates for data submission available on the NutNet website: Protocols & Templates

Any additional treatments or disturbance that could affect the data collected, whether intended or not (e.g., wildfire, prescribed fire, mowing, etc.), must be noted when data is submitted, to allow for appropriate documentation and assessment of confounding effects if necessary.

Data use

Data is available to network members once compiled by the data manager at the University of Minnesota. Participants can use NutNet data for analyses and publications, following the NutNet guidelines for publication and authorship. Every paper, presentation, etc. that uses NutNet data must include the standard acknowledgment statement.

Paper writing

Anyone interested in writing a paper that uses NutNet data must follow the NutNet guidelines for publication and authorship.

Add-on studies

In addition to being a distributed experiment designed to address core questions, NutNet also can serve as globally distributed infrastructure for additional studies that generate new response variable data from many sites. Participants can propose such an add-on study, following the guidelines for add-on studies.

Steering Committee

The NutNet steering committee serves to establish general guidelines for NutNet, including protocols, authorship guidelines, and data use and publication. Network participants who want to spend substantial time on network-wide NutNet management issues will be welcomed into the Steering Committee - Contact the Network Coordinator to get involved.

By submitting data for use in the Nutrient Network, you are agreeing to the terms listed above.