About the Portal Project

The Portal Project is a long-term ecological study being conducted near Portal, AZ. Since 1977, the site has been used to study the interactions among rodents, ants and plants and their respective responses to climate. To study the interactions among organisms, we experimentally manipulate access to 24 study plots. This study has produced over 100 scientific papers and is one of the longest running ecological studies in the U.S.

Find our data on GitHub. Or use our R package, portalr, to get easy data downloads and summaries, developed by those of us most familiar with the site and data.

The Portal Project is currently run by S.K. Morgan Ernest (University of Florida). It was established by James H. Brown (University of New Mexico), Diane Davidson and James Reichman in 1977. Thomas J. Valone (Saint Louis University) has also been a PI, running the plant and ant censuses. Ultimately, the site is successful because of the participation of undergraduates, graduates, and other scientists. Hopefully, many of these people will contribute their perspectives to the blog.

Finally, the purpose of this blog is to communicate more broadly about who we are and what we are doing. We plan on blogging about not only our research findings, but also about our data collection trips and anything else we feel is related to our research progress.