Swan and colleagues at Colorado State University and Indiana State University were awarded funds from the National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Research Network Communications Office to hold a series of working groups.  The project entitled “A synthesis to identify how metacommunity dynamics mediate community responses to disturbance across the ecosystems represented in the LTER network" will leverage data sets from across the more than 20 LTER sites to understand biodiversity patterns at multiple spatial scales. Working group meetings will take place over the next two years in Santa Barbara, California.